


Never Gonna Dance Again

by bunnoculars



Category: SHINee
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:29:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28257714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunnoculars/pseuds/bunnoculars
Summary: A year after Want, Taemin is about to hold his solo concert and come back with a new album when Covid hits. It leaves SM in chaos and throws Taemin's career into limbo. Despite the distance between them, he turns to Jonghyun more and more for consolation and support, all while trying to take back control of his life.As Jonghyun nears the end of his enlistment, meanwhile, he struggles to return to his old life when everything has changed, including his relationship with Taemin. He's faced with letting go and protecting what he already has, or going after the one thing he's always wanted most but never thought he could have.
Relationships: Kim Jonghyun/Lee Taemin
Comments: 63
Kudos: 93





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Will post as I write. Updates may be slow/sporadic, especially since my intention is to take turns between working on this story and my other WIP.
> 
> I originally planned to write this in two chapters called Act 1 and 2, but my outline got really out of control. Normally I prefer writing fewer, longer chapters, but once I decided to split it up, I thought maybe smaller pieces would work better this time. I can switch between WIP’s more easily, this has been a looong year and imo chapter breaks better convey a sense of time passing, ~~and I can fit more sex scenes in.~~ Since the number of chapters no longer signifies anything, though, I wanted to say here that the story will switch from Taemin’s to Jonghyun’s POV halfway through. 
> 
> I also thought I should say that I’ve compressed or fudged the timeline in parts for narrative purposes, and since I don’t have the benefit of years of hindsight, I’ve probably gotten even more wrong than usual haha. Additionally, while I’ve done basic research, this isn’t meant to be an accurate portrayal of the Covid response in Korea (or how the situation is viewed/talked about there). It’s impossible to write about this year without acknowledging we’re in the middle of a pandemic, especially since it played such a huge role in NGDA’s delays, but dealing with it irl is enough, while fic has always been an escape for me.

The first drag is like life and death, lungs burning, pulse rushing, smoke curling up into the darkening sky, and after that Taemin goes back to feeling nothing. His heart keeps beating and the sun keeps setting and his phone keeps ringing. When the door opens Taemin doesn’t need to look to know it’s Mooyeol hyung, or the exact expression on his face. _I thought you quit smoking._ Taemin did too, right up until five minutes ago, when this feeling started clawing him up from the inside out and he couldn’t find his vape pen anywhere, and one of the dancer hyungs let him bum a cigarette.

When his phone rang the first time.

“They’ll start calling me soon,” Mooyeol hyung says, sinking down next to Taemin on the dirty pavement. “Should I ignore them too?”

“It’s obvious what they’re going to say, anyway.”

Mooyeol hyung plucks the cigarette out of Taemin’s hand and takes a drag. “None of the staff or dancers have left yet, Taemin-ah. They’re waiting to hear it from you.”

When the first case was reported in Korea last month, SM told Taemin to proceed as normal, which was the first time in twelve years at this company that they told him anything like that. The legal team started sitting in on his meetings with Creative to discuss Covid restrictions and liability and litigation and all these other words Taemin looked up, then forgot when he stopped being invited. When he left for San Diego on the 29th he wasn’t sure what he would come home to, if the work of months would collapse while he was gone. And now…

The Olympic Handball Gymnasium seemed impossible when they booked it for T1001101 at this time last year, 5000 empty seats staring down at him as he practiced, but in the end he performed to a full house. This time he won’t even be able to fill one. Today was the last day he’ll stand on that stage, and the only person in the audience was the venue’s custodian. And that’s his ringtone again. Fuck. Taemin snatches his cigarette back for one last puff, then grinds it out against the cement and digs into his pocket for his phone. It almost vibrates out of his hand, and he’s already sliding his thumb up to accept the call when he sees the ID.

_boyfriend_

“Why is he calling now?” Taemin doesn’t realize he’s said it out loud until Mooyeol hyung shoots him a surprised look, but who cares. “Jonghyun hyung was right when he said he was too old for me, I should have picked someone who knows how to text. Shit, shit, shit.”

He picks up on the first ring, too, and before Taemin can say anything, he’s there.

“I called you so many times, Taemin-ah.”

Did he? Taemin only looked the first time to see if it was Creative, and then started walking until he found a door. He should know better, anyway. Taemin has told him so many times not to try him at work, that he’ll end up wasting his time and getting mad at Taemin for being busy when he knew he would be.

“You know I have rehearsals,” is as nicely as Taemin can say it. _Dongwook-ssi?_ Mooyeol hyung mouths. When Taemin flaps his hand at him, he stays put, leaning back against the wall and fishing his own carton of cigarettes out of his pocket, followed by his lighter. He said he was going to quit too. But anyway. “I didn’t have my phone until just now.”

Just now meaning since dinner break, which was half an hour ago already.

“Your company hasn’t canceled your concert yet?” Dongwook says.

Taemin’s stomach twists up into knots, and he has to fight just to keep his voice even. “They’re about to.”

“Is that why you haven’t picked up?” Dongwook doesn’t sound happy that Taemin is avoiding someone else and not him. He sighs in Taemin’s ear, winding him up tighter when he should be cutting straight through everything. What else are boyfriends for? “Ignoring the problem won’t make it go away, Taemin-ah.”

Telling you shit you already know but wish you didn’t, apparently. What about shit Taemin doesn’t? 

“There’s nothing I can say to stop them, is there? I’ve been thinking all day but I can’t come up with anything.”

“It’s irresponsible enough that your rehearsals went on this long. How many people have been working with you on site, twenty? Fifty? At least now they’re doing the right thing.” Dongwook pauses, then adds almost gently, “For everyone, Taemin-ah. That includes you.”

 _Is your company shutting down production on Music Bank?_ Taemin bites it back, along with every other bitter half-thought that trails in its wake. Dongwook doesn’t make any of the decisions on the budget team, anyway, he just makes the numbers add up. It’s only a matter of time before they stop allowing audiences on music shows, but if things get really bad and the entire KBS building has to close its doors, Dongwook can make the same calculations from home. It’s not Dongwook’s fault he lives in reality, though, or that when he came up to Taemin after church last fall to tell him he recognized him from Mubank’s set and ask him to have coffee sometime, Taemin couldn’t find a way to say no. Or that Taemin got out of work so late coffee became dinner, and he got drunk from only two glasses of wine and ended up sucking Dongwook’s dick in the parking lot outside the restaurant. Or that after burning through too many boyfriends for anyone but Jonghyun to even want to keep count, sex is still the only part of dating that Taemin understands. He’s a shitty boyfriend and he’s having a shitty day and he’s thinking nothing but the shittiest thoughts.

Taemin’s attempt to steal Mooyeol hyung’s cigarette ends with him on his butt, cold damp concrete seeping through his sweatpants while Mooyeol hyung turns away, blowing smoke. He has no right to judge Taemin for vaping ever again.

“What is it, hyung?” Taemin makes himself say. “There must be a reason you called.”

Five months ago Dongwook would have said easily, _I can’t call you just to call you?_

Today he says the same thing they started with: “Have dinner with me tonight.”

“Is that responsible?” It starts as a retort and ends as a question. They haven’t seen each other since Taemin got back from tour in Mexico, while everyone here has been together day and night for two weeks. All for nothing, now. He rubs his hand over his hair, still damp with sweat. Even if he had the energy, acting cute stopped working on Dongwook months and months ago. “Sorry, hyung, it just came out like that. I’m just, I’m really tired, and I’m having a shitty day. Some other night?”

Taemin waits for the answer he wants to hear. Any of them, he's not picky. _Okay, call me later. I’m sorry you’re having a hard time, I’m sorry everything you’ve worked for all year has been ruined. I’ll get takeout and come over. Whatever Taeminnie wants~._ None of that sounds anything like Dongwook, though, and he should have expected it when he says instead, “We might not have another chance to see each other any time soon, is all. And we need to talk.”

Oh.

So it’s that.

Taemin’s eyes flit towards Mooyeol hyung, but he’s still looking anywhere but Taemin. Taemin squeezes his eyes shut so tight it would hurt if he could feel anything, and then opens them again. Everything looks the same.

“You can’t say it over the phone?”

Should Taemin say it for him? ‘Let’s break up.’ It should be so easy, but the words stick in his chest, cutting off his air.

“I’d rather give you the long version,” Dongwook says. “When should I make the reservation for?”

Taemin isn’t dressed to go anywhere that would take one, and the last place he wants to be after the day he’s had is some fancy restaurant where the food doesn’t taste like food to him. If Jonghyun or any of the hyungs were here, he would tell Dongwook they already promised to buy him food, but they’re not, and he can’t pretend he’s going to go out drinking with the dancer hyungs when Dongwook knows the truth. And no matter how many useless excuses Taemin comes up with as he sits here with his sweat drying and his heart hurting, he can’t bring himself to just say no. He picks seven and hangs up.

That leaves him an hour to say goodbye.

To everyone, to this place, to the part of himself he’ll leave behind here. Just thinking about it feels like being ripped apart, even hiding out here.

“He wants to talk?” Mooyeol hyung says, now that he exists again. He probably heard everything.

“I’m getting dumped twice today.”

Mooyeol hyung should give him his whole pack of cigarettes, but instead he says, “You don’t know that, Taemin-ah.”

“Did wardrobe pack up yet? I have to change, I can’t show up like this.”

Taemin’s phone buzzes in his hand and his heart grinds to a stop, but it’s only a text this time.

From Jonghyun.

Taemin forgot until just now that he said he’d visit him at his base tomorrow. It would have been his first day off in forever, and the end of months and months of messages pestering Taemin to come see him. This one feels different. If he opened it, would it be another reminder to wake up early and beat traffic, or a warning not to come? That Jonghyun isn’t worth risking his health, that Taemin should sit at home and hide from something he can’t even see and not make him worry. That the virus is probably already in Seoul and in the army, Jonghyun’s base even, and it’s only a matter of time before it explodes like in Daegu. That this thing that Taemin didn’t know existed a few months ago has taken control of his entire life.

“Three times,” Taemin corrects himself, but he still can’t make himself read it. He turns his phone off with clumsy fingers and stands. “Call Director-nim and set up a meeting.” He hesitates. “Just not for tomorrow morning, okay, hyung?”

“You can’t talk when you’re drunk, is that it?” Mooyeol hyung frowns up at him. “You’re the one who’ll hate yourself tomorrow morning, Taemin-ah, not him.”

The point isn’t if Taemin listens, it’s that Dongwook says it, and however fast Taemin gets drunk, Dongwook will take all the time he needs to get those three words out. It’s the same with SM and his concert. And it’s not even that, that’s not why, and there’s no way Taemin could sleep tonight off. At this rate Taemin would have to drink enough soju to fill the Han River for it do any good, and if that didn’t kill him, maybe this feeling still would.

“I’ll go tell them.”

He wrenches the door open and steps out of the light.

The dancers want to hear it less than Taemin wants to tell them, even, and the coordi noonas barely have the heart to make fun of him when they dress him for his date. Instead of accusing him of wanting to steal things, reminding him to bring everything back tomorrow when there won’t be one, they tell him to give everything to Mooyeol hyung to take care of. In the end the staff packs up silently, people filtering out one by one as their job is done. It’s the longest and shortest fifteen minutes of Taemin’s career, watching them all go. “See you” feels like denial, goodbye like too much, and maybe it’s too early to say good night. The sun is beginning to set as they pull out onto the street, staining the sky pink. Taemin resists the urge to look back, leaning against his window and shutting his eyes instead. He’ll be back, but it won’t be tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, or all the days it takes for his muscles to forget the choreography and his vocal cords to recover, for his brain to stop racing through the set every waking moment, for each tiny mistake he made to stop eating his dreams at night. All the days it takes for this feeling to go away. Someday. After enlistment, maybe.

“They had no time tomorrow afternoon. Or in the morning, I checked just in case,” Mooyeol hyung says. The wheel creaks as he flexes his fingers, slotting Taemin half a glance. Taemin can feel his look. “Monday.”

Three whole days from now.

Taemin squeezes his eyes shut tighter, then opens them again. Nothing went away, least of all the claws in his heart. “Did they say anything else?”

Mooyeol hyung’s hesitation crushes in on Taemin. “SuperM’s European tour dates are still on.” And Taemin was going to film his first MV in Paris. Everything is still set up. As for his second one…

“Have they worked things out with the PD yet?” 

“They didn’t mention it.” Another pause, even heavier than the last. “SuperM’s comeback might get pushed back, they’re not sure yet.”

“Why are they worrying about June before March?” February is almost over already. Taemin takes a deep breath, then another, another another another. “I don’t wanna know what that means for me, do I.”

Mooyeol hyung’s brow creases in sympathy. “They don’t know yet, either, if that helps. The whole year got thrown up in the air, and now they’re scrambling.” 

And they left themselves enough time to decide everything before Taemin gets there. Fucking great.

The bitter taste hasn’t left his mouth by the time Mooyeol hyung finds a parking spot half a block from the pasta restaurant Dongwook picked. When Taemin eats on his own he sticks with the same three places in his neighborhood, but Dongwook has never taken Taemin to the same one twice, maybe because they haven’t been on that many dates. If Taemin isn’t busy, he’s tired, and if he isn’t tired, he always has plans already with Jongin or Wonsik or another friend. And on work nights, which is almost every night, that’s usually after twelve, long after Dongwook has set his alarm and gone to sleep. It took Taemin’s entire life grinding to a stop to bring them both here tonight, this one last time.

Mooyeol hyung would probably think that’s dramatic. All he has to say is, “I’ll wait ten minutes.”

“It’s fine, hyung.”

“I have nothing better to do at home, anyway.”

“You’ll end up waiting all night. He’ll probably take forever to work up to it, just like with everything else.” If Taemin hadn’t gotten drunk and gone down on him after their first date, they probably still wouldn’t have had sex by now, and they’d done it like a million times before he told Taemin he was too loud. And Mooyeol hyung doesn’t need to know any of that. Taemin tilts the rearview mirror towards him, combing his fingers through his hair, biting his lips, adjusting his collar, like any of this matters. Like he even needs to ask, “How do I look?”

“Like you should be the one dumping him,” Mooyeol hyung lies faithfully.

“My parents like him. Once my mom finds out she’s going to go crazy trying to get us back together.”

Taemin will just keep it from her as long as he can. Maybe the government will have mercy and shut down church services, and then she’ll go months without seeing Dongwook again.

“You don’t know that it’s that, anyway,” Mooyeol hyung is saying. “He could really want to talk.”

“This is why you’re single since birth, hyung. You make too much sense and relationships make none.”

Taemin shoulders his door open. Mooyeol hyung’s “Fighting, Taemin-ah” almost gets shut in the van with him, and then Taemin is on his own. His legs ache from weeks of practice, but they carry him all the way to the front desk, then over to the table tucked away in the corner where Dongwook is already waiting. In all the time they’ve dated, has Taemin ever once had to wait for him? But at least tonight he wasn’t late. Dongwook must have been early. He smiles at Taemin as he slides into the seat across from him and the waitress leaves them with two menus. Which are all in English. The letters swim across the page, crammed together one after the other into words he recognizes instantly, words he doesn’t, words he’s probably heard or even said but never read. None of it would mean anything to Taemin, anyway.

“Do you want me to order for you?” Dongwook says.

Taemin’s English isn’t that bad. He ignores the heat creeping into his face and picks something at random. He sounds it out silently for the five minutes it takes the waitress to return, pretending he doesn’t notice whenever Dongwook’s eyes drift to his face, or the surprise flickering across his features when Taemin’s pronunciation isn’t laughable. Once their menus are gone, Taemin has nowhere left to hide, and for the first time since they started dating, Dongwook doesn’t do all the talking. He waits for Taemin to ask first. He cycles through every cliché he can think of, how was your day, how was work, how are you, but nothing Dongwook tells him leads to any real questions. His day was stressful. No one knows what will happen or how hard the government will come down on broadcasting, there’s no internal strategy for dealing with any of it, they can’t revise the budget without more information, and a lot more Taemin might be able to understand if he listened harder, but Dongwook didn’t listen to him before at all.

_My day was shitty. Is shitty, including right now. Work was worse than that. I’m the worst. My whole body hurts, and my heart hurts more than the rest of it put together._

When their food comes Taemin digs in. The first time Dongwook took him out to eat pasta, he chided Taemin when he slurped his noodles, showing him how to wind them around his fork. Taemin didn’t tell him he was like the tenth person in his life to teach him how to do that, and today that becomes just one more thing he stuffs his mouth to avoid saying.

Dongwook toys with his own fork, eyeing Taemin. “Is it good?”

“Mm.”

It tastes like nothing.

“I didn’t know you liked cream sauces.”

“I like everything.”

Another lie, but one Dongwook will never catch him in. It’s not like he’s Jonghyun or someone, with years of coaxing him into eating anything green behind him.

Dongwook watches him some more. Hesitates some more. “Have you stopped ignoring SM now, too?”

Taemin wasn’t even ignoring him in the first place, he already said. How was he supposed to know that today was the day they break up? Dongwook decided that on his own. As for SM…Taemin swallows hard, laying his fork down.

“It’s the other way around now,” he admits. “The earliest they’d meet with me was Monday.” Dongwook’s expression just barely flickers, but Taemin can’t stop himself from saying, “What?”

“Nothing.” Dongwook clears his throat, caught halfway between looking away and holding out to see how Taemin might take whatever it is. “I just thought once you’d had more time to think you’d be more rational about this.”

About what? His life being put on hold? His blood, sweat, and tears all circling the drain?

“Your side of things doesn’t move at the same pace as mine, hyung. Nothing moves until you decide it does, and none of it affects you, either. I can’t do anything unless someone else lets me. If I wait one day SM will turn that into a month.”

“I don’t know what language they used, but postponing it is the same as canceling it at this point,” Dongwook says, halfway between reproachful and apologetic and totally pointlessly. “The virus isn’t going away.”

How could Taemin not know that? The weight of all the time he’s lost before it’s even passed has been crushing him since this afternoon. It’s only the first day out of how many to come, and he can barely breathe from it.

“It’s not that anymore, it’s my comeback,” he makes himself say.

“What about it?”

“They’ve already delayed it for a year, I need to make sure it’s still on track.” Taemin draws his hands into his lap before they curl into fists, so tight his fingernails dig into his flesh. “You’re making a face again.”

A different one. This one means _I don’t know how to tell you this without you taking it out on me the way irrational people do, but…_

“You’re not on Music Bank’s slate for March.”

Taemin’s stomach plummets into freefall. He goes on like it hasn’t, “SM is usually late setting things up, you know that better than me.”

Dongwook picks up his fork again, spinning pasta onto it so neatly Taemin wants to tell him it’s just going to get chewed up and come out as shit. Half a glance from Dongwook and that all dies in his throat, along with everything else inside him.

“Not this late, Taemin-ah.”

“Which is why I need to talk to them.”

Dongwook’s lips press together into one long thin line, but it comes out anyway: “They submitted the designs and paid for all NCT 127’s sets last week. And they worked out the dates for another artist. An EXO member.”

Oh.

Fuck.

Dongwook is watching his face so carefully, like he’s a bomb about to go off, all over him and his perfectly parted hair and nice suit and expensive dinner. What is Taemin supposed to say? How is he supposed to feel? Maybe Dongwook could tell him if he asked, but instead he keeps eating, stuffing his mouth until words can’t fit inside.

“There’s not much to say that could change things at this point at this point, anyway,” Dongwook says, taking another small bite. He waits until he’s swallowed to add, “Not just between you and SM, either, between you and me. No need to ruin your meal over something that’s already decided.”

_Then why are you wasting money on it in the first place?_

“Why do you want to break up with me?”

“What?” Dongwook flounders, opening his mouth as each new excuse or denial comes to mind, then closing it. “Taeminnie—"

“I know I’m a bad boyfriend and I’m fine leaving it at that, but you called me here so you could explain, right?” comes out of Taemin. “I’m tired and I’m hungry and I hate places like this, so let’s just skip to the end, hyung.”

“You said you liked the food,” Dongwook says of all things.

“I don’t hate it, either, I just. It’s not my style.”

But who the fuck cares about lies that small when Taemin has told so many bigger ones. At least he’s never said I love you, not even when he came with Dongwook inside him, at least he was waiting to mean it.

“I'm sorry, Taemin-ah. This isn't how I wanted to tell you, I wanted to work up to it. But maybe there's no good way." His brows pinch together as he searches Taemin's face. For what, Taemin doesn't know. "Is this really so easy for you? This is hard for me. It hurts me to hurt you.”

“Don’t worry, Director-nim already broke my heart. I can’t feel anything right now.”

Taemin is only half-joking. Dongwook’s silverware clunks onto the table, and he sits back in his chair, shooting Taemin a look as though he’s the one who put him in this position. If he’d just dumped him over the phone, Taemin could be having barbecue with Mooyeol hyung right now, tearing up in the smoke, eating meat as red as his feelings, drowning himself in soju until he wakes up and it’s tomorrow.

“You’re taking this so lightly,” Dongwook accuses Taemin. “How am I supposed to talk to you when you’re like this?”

“Sorry, hyung,” Taemin forces out, and then, “I told you, today isn’t good for me. But I’m listening. Really. Go ahead.”

For one long moment, Dongwook just looks at Taemin, but it’s without ever seeing him.

“It’s just…the situation with Covid has given me the chance to re-evaluate my own life,” Dongwook begins haltingly. “I’m realizing there are a lot of things I thought I wanted, that I just…don’t.”

“Like me,” Taemin shouldn’t say, but this time Dongwook ignores him.

“Where do you see our relationship going, realistically? We would have dated for a while longer and broken up.”

Taemin never realized until now that he’s never thought about it. He said yes to Dongwook because he couldn’t say no, he stayed with him because he was there, and now that they’re breaking up, his only wish is that they could get it over with. Is it the same for Dongwook? Did he ask Taemin for coffee and then take him to dinner wanting it to be a date? Did he let Taemin suck his dick in his car because that meant getting his dick sucked? Taemin has never slept over at Dongwook’s place, just his own and hotels, and on the mornings they woke up together, nothing Taemin did could ever tempt him back into bed if it meant being a minute late for work. Taemin would probably be the same if he had his hours, but still.

“You’re tired of me?” Taemin guesses.

“Not everything is about that,” Dongwook says, voice strangled. He glances around like that would sound dirty to anyone but him. When he turns back to Taemin, he’s wearing another face Taemin has seen before. _Please don’t embarrass me._ “Let’s end this well, Taemin-ah.”

If Taemin knew what that meant, sure. Yes. Anything. But he doesn’t.

“I never get why people say that,” he says. “It’s the ending, you’re not going to want to remember it no matter what.”

Dongwook feeds him a thousand more excuses, all different flavors of it’s not you, it’s me, each one sounding more and more like it’s not me, it’s you, until finally the check comes. He won’t let Taemin pay this one time, and when they step out into the street again he asks Taemin if he needs a ride home, then if he needs him to call a taxi for him. Which he doesn’t. It’s only now that Taemin has learned to say no, but that probably shouldn’t be the last thing he says to him, right? But the only other thing he can think of is, “I hope you find what you want, hyung. Really.”

_Since you already found out what you don’t. I gave you a head start._

“Tell your mother to take care of her health,” Dongwook says. He pauses awkwardly, shifting his weight, before settling with, “You, too. Don’t work too hard.”

He has nothing to worry about. Taemin won’t. He can’t. There’s no moon to watch as Dongwook walks one way, and Taemin goes the other, but the streetlamp spills over the pavement, turning it to gold. On his way in he had to weave through traffic, but now the lights are winking at no one, red then green. There’s no way that was only ten minutes, but Taemin finds Mooyeol hyung right where he left him, slumped back in his seat with his book over his face. When Taemin raps on the door it slides off onto the floor as he starts awake, staring up at Taemin uncomprehendingly. It only takes him a few extra seconds to get it, and then a few more to find his keys and then remember which way to turn. His silence lasts the whole ride, at least until Taemin asks him to drop him off at the convenience store down the street from his house, and then he says, “Don’t buy too much, Taemin-ah.”

Soju, he means. Taemin gets as much as he can carry up to the counter in one trip, cursed by his own small hands, but he was smart to pass over the bottles for the cartons. As soon as he exits the store, he punches the straw into the first one, and somehow it carries him the rest of the way up the hill, to his place. Elevator. Fifth floor. Passcode…Shinee Day? Shinee Day. He should change it soon, or someone will break in. If he stays famous enough for that kind of shit to happen. It’s hard when the others are gone, and he’s the only one here.

It’s just hard.

Second carton. Same straw. It’s all chewed up, but that just means he has to work harder for the soju, and that’s the one thing in life he knows he can do. Work hard.

He’s good at giving head, too. Really good, whatever Dongwook thinks. He has no right to judge anyway, he always got Taemin with his teeth. Maybe he should try that at SM, see how far he gets on his knees. How many dicks would he have to suck for his album to come out?

Jonghyun would kill him for even thinking that. More like kill everyone at SM. Or something. Or not at all. That one time that staffer sold Taemin’s info to some old ahjussi, he just got drunk and cried and told Taemin hyung was sorry he couldn’t protect him, that he’d die rather than let anything happen to him. Taemin told him he lost his phone anyway. No need to change his number, even.

Taemin’s not even crying now, but if Jonghyun saw him now he’d steal the rest of his soju and bury Taemin in blankets. After he took off Taemin’s clothes. These aren’t his, though. Noonas will kill him if this feeling doesn’t first.

Soju is supposed to help. Should he start dating it?

His phone.

In his pocket. Silent. Finally. He can forget it exists.

Or not.

_dont tellme not to see u hyung_

Don’t send. Delete delete delete.

Delete his whole life.

Or fast-forward. Yeah. To when it stops hurting.

When will that be?

Hyung.

Soju.

Taemin wakes up.

Not on his own. It’s the spike drilling into the back of his head. Then other things too, thousands of them crowding in on him, carpeting his tongue and crawling under his skin and burning into his eyelids, bright red. That last thing means the sun has to be up. He slept that long and now that he would give anything to go back to it he doesn’t know how.

Wait.

What time is it?

Taemin’s eyes fly open, blinded by the light, but his hand is already there, slapping along his bedside table until he hits his clock. As soon as his vision returns the bottom falls out of his stomach instead. Seven.

FUCK.

He’s halfway across the room before he remembers he needs clothes. He picks things at random, pants, shirt, socks, underwear, there. If nothing matches Jonghyun will have an excuse to make fun of him. He’d find a way regardless. The last time Taemin visited he went straight from a schedule to the base without even going home first, and Jonghyun’s only thanks was to ask him if he wore makeup because he was afraid his bare face would shock Jonghyun after so long. It had only been a few weeks since the last time they saw each other then, but now it’s been months, and when Taemin catches sight of himself in the bathroom mirror a monster looks back, puffy and bloated. What is he supposed to do about his cheeks? They’re bad enough when he doesn’t drink, or else Jonghyun wouldn’t have spent all these years pinching and poking and smushing them, when he wasn’t lying and telling Taemin he had a small face.

Whatever. He’s wasting time and he has none. If traffic is bad he’ll miss Jonghyun.

There’s nothing that could make him human again right now, but he stands under the shower and tries for five minutes, scrubbing last night away, then chases a painkiller with a can of Dawn 808. He forgets his keys until he’s one step from the elevator and only remembers his phone when he’s backing out of his parking spot. Too late. 

He hasn’t forgotten not the message he never read, though. As his headache recedes it leaves too much room for thoughts, and the feeling from before sticks in his chest for the whole drive to Cheorwon, no matter how much he speeds or how high he turns the volume up or how blue the sky gets. Living with it for one more hour is nothing after all last night, though, and after the soldier at the guardhouse waves him through to the visitor’s lot he can breathe again. It’s okay for once that he can’t park to save his life, since no one else is around.

It’s the same in the visiting room. The last time Taemin came up, there were still leaves on these trees, orange and red and gold, and the whole building rumbled with laughter, groups of friends gathered around pizza and chicken and pop, girls in curled hair and dresses feeding their boyfriends lunchboxes, Jonghyun staring at Taemin from across their table like just bringing himself was enough. Today the snow has turned to slush, and the room is blanketed with an even thicker silence, and sunlight streams in through the windows and puddles on the floor.

Only the look on Jonghyun’s face is the same. 

_Hyung._

In the next heartbeat, Taemin’s feet are carrying him across the room, but instead of opening his arms for Taemin to step into, squeezing him so tight it feels like his ribs will crack, rocking him in place, breathing him in, any of those things, Jonghyun drags his chair out until it bumps up against the table behind them. As he sinks down into it, Taemin’s heart follows. But he does the same, taking his seat across the table from him. The extra three feet between them probably isn’t far enough to protect them from each other, if they even need protecting, yet it stretches on for miles until Jonghyun catches his eyes, his own crinkling up into his biggest, stupidest smile. He looks good. Kibum has told Taemin that his skin care regime in the army consists of sleeping and drinking water, and maybe that’s working for Jonghyun, too. Maybe he can sleep here. And eat, too. The hollows in his cheeks are gone, and he’s filled out the uniform that used to hang off him. Jinki keeps saying that the army has made him fat, all that frozen food and no manager to stop him, but when Jonghyun went in he was so skinny he told Taemin it hurt to look at himself. Taemin is the one who’s hurting, looking at him now. This is so unfair. He should have worn makeup, or a face mask at least.

He really should have. Shit. But Jonghyun didn’t think of that either, and at least this one time, it has to be okay.

“Did you drink last night?” Jonghyun says in place of hello.

Of course he’d know. Of course. He always does. “I don’t smell.”

Jonghyun’s smile widens like he can’t help it. “Your glasses are cute.”

In other words: _You didn’t have time to put your contacts in since you woke up so late, right?_

Right, but Taemin blusters, “Because I’m wearing them. Everything about me is cute, that’s what you always say.”

Even if Jonghyun is the only one who thinks so, and he’s not giving him that _Taeminnie is so cute~_ look right now. Taemin watches as his smile fades from his face.

“You should have slept it off instead of coming here, Taemin-ah. How was it easier for you to get up than to read the text I sent you?” Jonghyun studies him narrowly, almost like he’s searching for tells. To give away what, Taemin doesn’t know. “They’ll probably shut down visits tomorrow.”

“It’s that bad already?” Taemin says, heart in his throat suddenly. “The news only reported three cases at a different base.”

So far.

“It’s precautionary. They’re restricting all non-essential travel.” Jonghyun slumps back in his chair, rubbing his hand over his head. He used to do that until his hair stood on end, back when he still had any. “At this rate I won’t be able to use up the rest of my vacation days, even though all I ever do is sit at home.”

He’s getting out in August, a few months and a million years from now. Part of Taemin would give anything to go to sleep and wake up on the day of his discharge, but it hurts everywhere to think that far ahead. Will his album even have come out by then?

“That’s your choice,” Taemin says out loud, and when Jonghyun shoots him a look like he’s supposed to, “You turned me down that time, when I asked you if you wanted to go to Jejudo with me.”

“After your boyfriend dumped you at the last minute,” Jonghyun adds immediately, like Taemin forgot the most important detail. Which he did. “You would have looked at me and thought of him the whole time, Taeminnie.”

Taemin hasn’t thought of Seungyoon in months, and Dongwook will probably be the same. And they both broke up with Taemin because he never thought of them when they were together, either. But he’d rather die than admit any of that to Jonghyun, even if in all the time Taemin has known him, he’s stayed right where he belongs, in the back of Taemin’s head, buried deep in his heart, with him through everything. If Jonghyun doesn’t know that by now there’s no point in telling him.

“Next time I won’t risk my health to come see you.”

The joke falls flat before it’s even out of his mouth, air between them grown so thick it crumples up into nothing. He can’t unsay it, though, he has to sit there and watch those words hit Jonghyun’s face, mouth tightening, brow creasing, eyes softening, then listen to him say in this awful rush, “Don’t say that, Taeminnie. I won’t be able to breathe for two weeks as it is.” He leans forward, already reaching for Taemin, when he remembers and lets his hand fall onto the table between them. “Let me know how you’re feeling every day, okay?”

Taemin is younger than him, and he’s also not the one with a body like glass. Learning how to kill people and doing military drills all day for the past year won’t have changed that.

“You too, hyung,” he says.

Jonghyun’s shoulders relax almost imperceptibly. “I’m the one who’ll actually remember.”

“I’m the one who’ll actually tell you if I get sick,” Taemin retorts. “You’d try to hide it from me like everything else.”

He usually sucks at it, too, but only when Taemin can see his face and hear his voice and annoy him into telling him what’s wrong. It’s different long distance. Everything is. Small things become smaller, and big things disappear with Jonghyun’s silence, as though they never existed. He’s not like Jinki, either, he doesn’t tell obvious lies like “hyung is fine.” It took Taemin half a year and three other people to piece together that Jonghyun got shot with a blank during basic training, from close enough that it left a scar on his chest Jonghyun finally showed him at one of the picnic tables outside, after telling him it was an accident, it only hurt at first, and they didn’t even know who did it anyway, simulations are confusing like that. It was summer then and Jonghyun’s skin was sun-kissed, dappled with leafy shadows from the branches scratching on the window now. His only question was whether it looked sexy, and Taemin had no answer except _hyuuuuuuuung._ He was too mad to remember a single other word.

“Meanwhile, you’re the one who keeps leading me around in circles,” Jonghyun says now. “There’s a reason you came here to see me, Taeminnie.”

To feel sorry for himself. No one else would want to hear it, and maybe even Jonghyun won’t this time. They’re in the middle of a pandemic. Somehow.

Taemin falters. “I can’t miss you?”

He does, so much he’s learned to live with the constant ache from it, but Jonghyun’s expression doesn’t change. “They canceled your concert, right?”

“I was going to tour Japan this summer, hyung,” spills out of Taemin before he can even think twice, and then it all starts to unravel. “SuperM is set for the Tokyo Dome in April, but they’re already cutting me off.” 

_There will be other stages, Taemin-ah,_ someone else would say. Normally Jonghyun would have petted his hair, squeezed his shoulder, pulled him into a hug and let him hide in his shoulder, but now he just looks at him some more. Taemin folds his hands together in his lap to keep them there, lacing his fingers up so tight it hurts.

“That’s before we’ve even met to discuss it. It’s looking like my album will get pushed back again, too. I’m a bad investment even with ticket sales. Without them…”

“Taeminnie,” Jonghyun starts up finally, but even that is too much.

“I know all the reasons for it, I don’t need to hear them again.” Taemin takes a deep breath. Tries to smile. “When I named it Never Gonna Dance Again, it was meant to be ironic, but I ended up cursing myself.”

Jonghyun smiles back, small and painful. It reaches his eyes. “Dance for me, then.”

“What?”

“Show me the choreo for your song,” Jonghyun says. “I want to see.”

“2 Kids” doesn’t have a choreography and “Idea” doesn’t belong here. It was meant for that stage, long shadows and bright white lights, blasting through the sound system and shattering over a pearl aqua ocean. And the next best thing, in Jonghyun’s earbuds, on his phone, while he went back and forth between streaming and texting Taemin stupid things like _hyung is proud of u. u did so well taeminnie. my heart was pounding so fast i could hear it over the bass~. why didnt u tell me u shot 2 mvs? i know they didnt just fall in ur lap, how hard did u have to shake sm first_

So hard. For a whole year. Ever since Want’s repackage got canceled instead of going unpromoted like he’d expected, and “2 Kids” slipped into purgatory. It was never meant to be performed, not strong enough to be his comeback title track, yet too close to Taemin’s heart to end up as a B-side. “Idea” took longer to grow on him, but it’s been with him since last fall, and the dance has evolved ten times since then, each new choreographer adding something harder than the last to ensure Taemin dies along with the song’s final note. Jonghyun would have loved – will love it.

“I don’t want you to,” Taemin says. “It would have been perfect for once. You would have watched me with no expectations, and then you could have seen the Taemin everyone else sees.” _Instead you’re stuck with the one that only you do._ Taemin scrubs his hands over his face and resists the urge to hide behind them. “It’s not my glasses, it’s because I’m bloated, right? That’s how you knew.”

“You look really pretty today,” Jonghyun says.

“You already told me I look like shit.”

“I said you were cute. I meant it.”

Taemin’s heart flutters feebly, but after so many years of hearing that same thing, it’s so easy to ignore it.

“You should have just sent me back without seeing me. The other hyungs don’t even want me to come. I was going to visit Kibum hyung with Rino noona, and he told me not to bother. Just because I’m a man.”

Jonghyun takes that in and says back, “Whenever you visit, they can’t stop asking me about you. The other guys here, I mean. It’s to the point where hyung feels a little jealous.”

He’s impossible. It sounds like such a lie that if it were anyone else, Taemin wouldn’t even believe them.

“They probably get me and Taeyeon noona confused. Either that, or they feel sorry for you because you don’t have a girlfriend.”

He broke up with his last one before enlisting. Minho figured it was because he didn’t want her to wait for him, but the night they took him up here to enlist, Jonghyun got drunk out of his mind and confessed she was more like a fuck buddy than anything. If Taemin says yes to people and then fails to grow feelings for them, Jonghyun falls in love and never asks them out, breaking his own heart, slowly, stupidly, over months and years. There’s always someone. Even if he cried until his body ran out of water and replaced it all with soju, the only thing Jonghyun will never tell him is who. He probably doesn’t want Taemin to hate them.

“There’s another Taemint in my unit, didn’t I tell you? I’ve asked him if he wants to get a picture with you before, but he’s too scared to approach you. He just looks from afar, he’s that kind of fan,” Jonghyun goes on like Taemin didn’t say anything. “I didn’t tell him you were coming today, just in case. I didn’t want to share~.”

He’s so dumb.

Just not as dumb as Taemin. Before he can stop himself he’s making another joke that tastes like shit and sounds worse: “Should I ask SM if I can hold my concert here instead?” His stomach twists, and before those words can hit Jonghyun’s face, “I’m just kidding, I know that’s just as bad,” comes flying out of him. “I know it’s selfish, I know it’s wrong, it’s just. I don’t know how much longer I can do this. They had finally run out of bullshit to put me off, only for this to happen.”

Jonghyun’s fingers flex uselessly on the tabletop, fighting the primal instinct to reach for Taemin again. It must be written into Taemin’s body, too. Jonghyun’s touch. The absence of it is settling into his skin, this weird tingling numbness whiting out everything else.

“It’s okay to be selfish, Taeminnie,” Jonghyun says, like he would. He was never going to tell Taemin anything he should be hearing like, _You can afford to lose another year of your career. Enlistment isn’t the end of your life, Taemin-ah. People are dying out there._ “You have to take care of yourself while I’m not there to do it.”

And now his heart hurts, on top of everything else, and it’s all Jonghyun’s fault.

He should have started by asking, “What about you, hyung, how are you?”

“I eat and sleep.” Jonghyun smiles at the look on Taemin’s face. “There’s not much else to do here.”

Besides work out. Taemin went with the wrong question. “How are your abs?”

Jonghyun laughs, loud and bright, but he lifts his shirt to show Taemin. He could have just told him they were doing well. Better than that. There probably aren’t words for it. 

“What about yours?” Disappeared under waffles and French fries during the American leg of SuperM’s tour. When Taemin raises his eyes to Jonghyun’s face, he doesn’t find the smirk he expected. His expression is a cipher. “The fandom is going crazy, they said you got a tattoo.”

Shit.

“You saw all that? You barely ever have your phone,” Taemin tries, already knowing it won’t work.

Jonghyun’s head tilts ever-so-slightly, narrowed eyes pinning Taemin in place. “So you did.”

 _Yes. No. The one on my back isn’t permanent, don’t worry, not that there’s anything to worry about. There’s nothing wrong with it._ “You have tattoos, you can’t get mad.”

“You’re not me,” Jonghyun says. Words jumble up in Taemin’s mouth, excuses, protests, explanations, before he cuts straight through all that: “And I’m not Minho, I’m not mad, I was just asking.”

Oh. Okay. Good. Taemin shrugs out of one arm of his jacket, rolling up his sleeve to bare his forearm and laying it across the table, flaming heart inked in black across his skin. It was way less scary to have it done than it is to sit here under Jonghyun’s eyes, looking at him look at it. His silence slams into Taemin, leaving him with this weird breathless feeling, and as soon as Jonghyun sits back he does too, tugging his shirt back down to cover it.

“The other one is a secret.” Even if Taemin can’t stop himself from telling that much, or adding, “On my hip, not anywhere weird.” And when Jonghyun doesn’t reply within the next five seconds, “It wasn’t like I suddenly woke up and decided to do it, I’ve thought about it for years.”

“It’s your body, not SM’s.”

Jonghyun is agreeing with him, so why does it feel like he’s not? Why won’t this stupid feeling go away, why is Taemin saying, “They’re not your style, right? You don’t like them.”

Dongwook hates. Hated them. Maybe that was what did it? But he barely gets the words out before Jonghyun is rushing to reassure him, “It’s not that, Taeminnie.” But then he hesitates, folding his arms over his chest and considering Taemin with his lip caught between his teeth. “I don’t like not knowing about you. I’m no different from your other fans these days, I find out everything from the Internet and I can’t tell what’s true. Now the Taeminnie in my head needs updating.”

His mouth curves into the tiniest smirk, and Taemin’s ears go hot all on their own. “The one on my arm is enough for that.”

“I’ve seen you naked way too many times to forget, even if I wanted to,” Jonghyun doesn’t need to remind him. He rubs his thumb over his bottom lip, expression shifting subtly. “How are you other than SM?”

“There’s no such thing.”

Jonghyun teeth catch on his thumbnail, almost like he’s forgotten it’s there. “Did you break up with Dongwook-ssi?”

“No,” flies out of Taemin, and then it’s too late, no way back to the truth. Jonghyun is going to know he’s lying, and then he’ll make twice as much fun of him as he would have otherwise, and.

Jonghyun’s jaw tightens. “He broke up with you?”

 _“No.”_ If Dongwook had just waited until this morning he wouldn’t have had to, Taemin would have died somehow or other trying to escape talking about him. Jonghyun always does this to him, _always._ “I’ve just been really busy. I was on tour, and then I was busy preparing for my concert, and. We had dinner together last night.”

“And he got you drunk. I won’t ask if he took you home.” But he wants to, Taemin can tell, and he only holds it back for another five seconds before adding, “How long have you been dating, four months? He should know by now that you don’t drink well. It doesn’t console you, it makes you sad.”

Taemin did that to himself, and at this rate his headache is going to come back. “How many times have you taken me drinking?”

“So that you wouldn’t drink alone. That’s worse.”

“And you’re worse than me, you can’t drink at all. I always end up having to carry you up to your place.” But that’s all pointless, just like everything else Taemin has said. Jonghyun was right, they keep going around in circles, but when Taemin looks into his eyes, he can already feel himself starting to get lost again. “Tell me something I can take back with me, hyung.”

For one long moment, so long Taemin forgets he’s even waiting, Jonghyun just looks at him silently. Taemin looks back. And breathes.

“I’ll wait for you,” Jonghyun says finally. “I won’t look at anyone else. I won’t even listen to their music.”

Like he even listens to many idol groups normally. Anyway, “You’ll have to, our company is going to have to make up the loss of revenue somehow. If you go broke supporting everyone else, then maybe my turn will come faster.”

Jonghyun’s hands stay on the table.

“I’m sorry, Taeminnie,” is all he has left for him. “There’s nothing hyung can say or do for you, and I’m sorry for that too. Even if I were out, there wouldn’t be. But still, I’m sorry.”

It’s enough for Taemin’s throat to start closing on him. “I am too.”

_Sometimes it feels like it’s been millions of years since you’ve been gone. The company has changed. It’s not just this situation, it’s everything._

_Or maybe I’m getting too old. Maybe this is what it’s like._

Or the world is ending and it’s not about Taemin. If it really were, if this really is the last time they get to see each other in forever, what else is there to say?

Just the things Taemin never does: _I love you. I miss you. I know I don’t act like it, but I do. I think about you all the time, hyung. I’m sorry I never answer your messages, but I’m not sorry I didn’t read the last one. You better not be, either._

They talk about other things. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow in Seoul, but up here it might turn to snow. Jonghyun’s mom brought Roo to visit him last time, even though Jonghyun sees her every time he goes home. The guy in the bunk next to him broke up with his girlfriend last week and he cried himself to sleep, and Jonghyun acted like he didn’t know, but he’s still not sure that was the right thing to do. He says nothing about himself, but he asks after all the other hyungs, the SuperM members, Taemin’s mom and dad and brother, and Taemin pretends he doesn’t know that the person Jonghyun is really asking about is him, right up until their time is up. Normally Jonghyun would gather him up into his arms again to say goodbye, so warm and solid against Taemin that the rest of the world would disappear. Today he shadows Taemin to the door, then hangs back, and Taemin is stuck fighting every cell in his body, aching to close the distance between them.

“I meant what I said before, Taeminnie,” Jonghyun says. “Let me know how you’re doing. Please. You know I only get my phone once a day, and I’m probably going to spend all that time leading up to it making myself crazy thinking of you. I can’t come find you, either.”

If Taemin got sick it would show up on the news, but if he let Jonghyun find out like that he wouldn’t deserve to even breathe his air. He promises he’ll try, and he means it with all his heart, but immediately that gets him: 

“Just once a day. Tell Mooyeol hyung to remind you.”

“Should I just give you his number?”

“Don’t make me ask other people about you.” Jonghyun is staring at him like he’s trying to burn him into his brain, when he’s the one who told him there’s a Taemin already up there. “I used to know everything.”

_You still do._

Taemin has had Jonghyun’s face memorized for fifteen years, too, but he can’t look away either. Until he does somehow and he’s out in his car, chest tight, eyes burning, nowhere left to go except back to his life.

Taemin starts the car.

The world might be ending outside, but when Taemin walks into SM on Monday morning, nothing has changed. The floors sparkle and his footsteps echo off walls so white they’re almost glowing, and when he reaches the Creative Department, the silence is only broken by the sound of typing. As he cuts through the cubicles to the meeting room, staffers half-rise into bows, and on the other side of the door, Director-nim greets him with a tight smile and a gesture for him to sit across the table from him. It’s the only empty chair remaining, even though Taemin is early. If they’ve decided everything already, it doesn’t show on their faces. Nothing does. From the time Shinee was first invited upstairs to sit in on the decision-making process, years and years ago now, the one thing Taemin has learned is there are a thousand different ways to say no without ever using that word. He can never remember any of them.

“I thought maybe you’d send Mooyeol-ssi to sit in for you,” he says.

Taemin’s ears flush all on their own, but if he made any excuses for himself that would be worse. “Sorry. That was unprofessional of me, right?”

“I guess that wasn’t funny of me either.” He smiles again. This time it reaches his eyes. “Don’t worry about it, Taemin-ah. Everyone sitting at this table knows what it’s like to have months of work thrown out because of things beyond our control.”

Not just from the last few days, either. How many times have they prepared comebacks with Taemin, only to throw everything out and recycle parts of it later? And with Shinee, in the past five years, it feels as though there have been more comebacks that didn’t happen than comebacks that did. Members were busy. The timing was bad. Something came up, scandals, budget issues, clashes with other groups’ releases, anything. They would devise concepts and record songs only for SM to sit on them for months, while ideas that were fresh went sour, or other groups got there before they could. There are songs on Taemin’s album that have gone for a whole year already, and so has he. He wants them to be heard, and if he doesn’t do something, maybe they never will be. If he can do anything. If SM will let him.

He straightens his shoulders. “Are you refunding the tickets?”

“We’ll have to,” Director-nim replies. “The Gymnasium isn’t willing to proceed under the circumstances.”

“They were the ones who decided to cancel?”

“Postpone.” Director-nim’s mouth crooks ironically. “Indefinitely.”

Same thing. But if they forced SM’s hand, then maybe…

“Could we find a new venue? A bigger one, so we could space the seats out.”

Even as he says it the answer is already rising up like a wall: no. They shift in their seats, exchanging glances. Their job has consisted of telling Taemin things he doesn’t want to hear since the beginning, but he’s been with the company longer than all but two of them at this point. It’s harder for them, but no easier for him.

“Most social distancing guidelines say six feet, but legal is saying anything less than twelve could get us in trouble,” one of the junior staffers begins, before Director-nim cuts her off.

“At that rate you could fill Seoul Olympic Stadium by yourself.”

The staff dissolves into laughter, but even if it is funny, it’s not. Nothing is right now.

“I wasn’t joking,” Taemin says.

“As soon as the government bans large gatherings, concerts will be the first thing to go.” Director-nim sighs, leaning back in his chair and catching Taemin’s eye. All of the sudden it’s that much harder for Taemin to keep his head up. “And the longer this drags out the more other considerations come into play. Your image, for example.”

Taemin’s insides turn upside down.

“I don’t want anyone to get sick because of me,” he says in this awful rush. “Not because of how it looks. I’m selfish, but not that selfish.” His hands are twisting together in his lap, fingers laced so tight they’re going numb, but that way he can't tell if they’re shaking. “If there’s no way to do it without hurting people, then that’s it. But if there is...”

“We’ll keep looking, Taemin-ah.” Director-nim says it like it’s nothing, and it probably is. He clears his throat. “If the situation improves—”

“It’ll get worse before it gets better,” Taemin is cutting across him before he can stop himself, like Director-nim doesn’t know that as well as him. But what else is there to say? He takes a deep breath. “What about my comeback?”

“We’re running into problems there, too.”

Another thing they both already knew. It won’t help Taemin to ask, it’ll just lead to more bullshit, things Taemin has never been able to do anything before anyone knew Covid existed, and Dongwook might have had it wrong, and. And somehow it’s already out of his mouth: “But not with NCT?”

Shinee was debuted as an experiment, and for the last six years they’ve been an afterthought, and now Taemin’s solo career is too. Lee Sooman still takes his calls and buys him food and goes over corporate’s heads for him, but he’s never even shared one meal with the current CEOs. They want to make their mark with new blood, and in the years Taemin fought to have his own identity, he also got old.

“What do you want me to say, Taemin-ah?” Director-nim sighs, chair creaking as he sits forward to rest his elbows on the table. “Our team didn’t make the calculations, but calculations had to be made. The company is losing money as we speak.”

“I know they bring in more than me, I know I’m not worth much in pure album sales, I know all that.” It’s been a fact of Taemin’s life for so long it barely hurts him to admit it. This next thing hurts so much he could die. “But I could at least pay for myself. I’m not making anything for SM just sitting here.”

Director-nim is left to state another obvious fact. “We don’t set the budget, Taemin-ah.”

“But you make recommendations.”

“That they ignore, even under better circumstances.” Director-nim pauses. Hesitates. Then, almost gently, “You know better than me that the company doesn’t spend enough on you to prioritize getting a return on it.”

Taemin is out of arguments. Which means he’s out of hope. The end. He waits for it to hit him, preferably so hard it knocks the breath out of his body, along with every feeling inside him. And when it never does, he waits for his voice to sound normal. And breathes. Even ten seconds is too long with them all staring at him, but it takes at least thirty.

“So my comeback is canceled,” he says, and it still comes out like _that._

“Postponed,” one of the staffers corrects him, before Director-nim flashes another smile at him.

“I hate that word as much as you, but unlike your concert, we have some options – we can delay again, or release it with reduced promotions, maybe split it into two EP’s to stretch out physical sales…”

“This was supposed to be the second half of Want last year,” Taemin shouldn’t be saying. There’s no point. He swallows hard, combing his hair back from his face, like straw between his fingers. He shouldn’t have bleached it again last week, he should have known he’d have all this time to let it get healthier first. As it is, it’s broken and damaged. Dead.

“We can discuss it when you get back. Then we’ll know more.”

Director-nim rises to his feet, signaling the meeting’s over. All around him staffers stand, stretch, gather their things, but it takes a moment for Taemin to get it. SuperM. Tour. Paris.

And just like that, he’s back to having to ask. “What about my MV?”

“For ‘2 Kids?’” Director-nim barely has to think it over. “Film it. It’s too late to yank funding, and the production crew won’t run into problems in France.”

The meeting is over, Director-nim ended it himself, he can stop burying Taemin’s career alive anytime now. 

“Like ‘Idea’ has here, you mean,” Taemin would rather die than say. “Budget problems or Covid problems?”

“Both. No one wants to start shooting now in case the government screws them,” Director-nim starts to say, before something in the look on Taemin’s face stops him finally. “This is why I didn’t want to rush this meeting, Taemin-ah. Let’s just wait to see what the guidelines look like.”

 _There’s no time,_ dies like ash on Taemin’s tongue. There is. That’s the one thing SM never runs out of, even if Taemin will.

“Call me if anything changes,” he says. “I’ll pick up this time.”

"You’ll be busy. I have Mooyeol-ssi’s number.” Taemin is reaching for the door when he calls after him, “Taemin-ah.”

What now?

Director-nim is smiling at him again. For real, again. “Paris is beautiful.”

“I’ve been there before.”

“Aigoooo.”

It would take more than Taemin has to smile back right now. He has to put everything into breathing, even when he’s out in the open air, birds flying overhead, sidewalk glittering with ice, clouds floating by, sky so big and blue it hurts his eyes to stare at it. Instead of air, there’s the silence.

Taemin breathes.


	2. Chapter 2

When Taemin and Mooyeol hyung and the crew return to the hotel, the grey sky is blushing pink, and yesterday’s rain has left puddles like moats all around the entrance. The coordi noonas asked him if he wanted to change back into his own clothes before coming back here, but at that point he was already soaked to the bone, face numb, blood frozen, outfit from the MV clinging to him like a second skin. After sitting in the heated van for the twenty-minute drive back here, he’s warmed up to really fucking cold, and if he can stay on his feet long enough to shower, he’ll thaw the rest of the way. Unless his body cracks and breaks like ice. But his heart has been in pieces since his concert was cancelled, like broken glass in chest, and he’s still fine.

As the door swings shut behind the last crew member, he catches it with nerveless fingers, and turns his back on Paris without a second glance. He’s thanked PD-nim a thousand times since he made the trip to France with him despite everything, but he thanks him a thousand more times in the lobby, until PD-nim finally sends him off to the elevator and heads for the bar. Taemin should have bought a bottle of something from there, but there’s no Kibum to tell him what to get. Once they’ve bowed the last few crew members out of the elevator, only Mooyeol hyung is left, and Taemin can let the smile-like thing fade from his face. After all the nights like this they’ve shared since Taemin debuted solo and Mooyeol hyung was first assigned to him, there’s no way Taemin could fake anything in front of him.

“No schedule tomorrow, right?” Taemin asks.

Mooyeol hyung shakes his head at him. “Sleep. Your VCR filming is the next day and you can’t look tired for that.”

For “Think of You.” Another song that’s been with Taemin since the Want repackage that never was. The lyrics seemed so whiny back when he wrote them, but now each word will probably weigh enough to crush him, even lip syncing them for the cameras.

“They’re letting us go ahead with that after all?”

He could have said something. Director-nim forgot about it until Taemin remembered to ask, already on the plane over here, and then Taemin spent the last few days with the question in the back of his head. Mooyeol hyung smiles wanly at the look Taemin gives him.

“It’s low budget enough that it’d cost more to cancel,” he says. “The assistant PD agreed to direct you, since SM can’t spare anyone in-house.”

In case making it back into the country gets complicated, probably. The other members of SuperM won’t even arrive here until the day after tomorrow, and no matter how crowded the streets were today or how brightly all the people who walked by were smiling, part of Taemin is still waiting for the time Mooyeol hyung gets off the phone to tell him their concert is canceled. After the silence as deep as winter back home, this all feels like a dream. His MV, even more of one. The fact that he got to film it. That it went like it was supposed to, like normal. Even damp and cold and miserable, Paris is still so beautiful, and as night fell the city lights bled in the same rain that turned Taemin to ice. He put his heart and soul and his entire body, his everything, into making it perfect. He froze and starved and did every single thing PD-nim asked, even the things he barely knew how to, since he came here expecting backup dancers and choreography and got Taemin freestyling on his own instead.

And now almost two days after filming began, he’s ended up back on a floor he’s lucky Mooyeol hyung can remember the number of, and the reality is sinking in so deep it’ll take days to leave him, bruises just beginning to bloom on his skin, aches and pains every time he moves a single muscle, knees cracked from falling to them so many times, back killing him from the harness they suspended him from for the killing shot, eyes so heavy he can barely keep them open.

When Taemin starts off down the hall, Mooyeol hyung tugs him back. Oh. Wrong direction. He always knows and Taemin never does.

“Did you monitor the playback, hyung? It was hard for me to keep track of it all.”

“You looked cool.”

“I was supposed to look pathetic.”

Mooyeol hyung laughs. “If that’s the word you want to use. Your acting was great, Taemin-ah. Seriously.”

That would be a lie coming from anyone else, even Jonghyun, but Mooyeol hyung always sees things in the best light possible, even when they’re standing in total darkness. He watches Taemin try the key to his door to make sure he remembers how, then tells him good night when the sun is already peeking through the windows, asks him if he needs help figuring out how the blinds or the shower in this hotel work, reminds him to roll over and go back to sleep if he wakes up anytime soon. It’s only after the door clicks and his footsteps carry back down the hallway that Taemin is finally alone with himself. Then he wishes he wasn’t.

He showers in too-hot water. Puts on the first pair of pants and T-shirt he finds. Brushes his teeth, hands still clumsy from the cold somehow. Blinds. Bed.

Jonghyun.

He promised. One text a day. Taemin sticks his arm back outside his cocoon of blankets to fumble for his phone on first one bedside table, then the other, and ends up half out of his bed, streeeeeetching to reach the pile of wet clothes crumpled on the floor. His body is screaming at him as he hits the mattress again with a thwump, clutching his phone, but it’s not dead, and neither is Taemin. Taking a photo is always easier than trying to figure out what to type, or waking up to Jonghyun reading a thousand meanings into as few words as im tired. So what if he looks like shit. He was supposed to before, that was the whole concept. And now…

_I had a stupid breakup, hyung. Art imitating life~_

Jonghyun doesn’t even know. He doesn’t need to. By the time he gets out of the military maybe Taemin will have found someone new for him to make fun of. It’s already been three whole days since the last time he even thought about Dongwook, and he won’t follow him into his dreams. He never has.

_PD-nim said I gave him more than enough to work with. I wish I could have given more. The only parts of me left are all useless. I keep thinking stupid thoughts. Like that. I’m so tired but I can’t sleep._

_Tell me I did well, hyung. I know I did, but still._

_Tell me that matters at all._

_I know it doesn’t._

_What time is it there? What are you doing? Sleeping still?_

Taemin is.

Until he’s not. The sun is right where he left it, leaking in through the blinds, weak and watery, and so is everything else. Still, time has passed. It has to have.

…only two hours. That’s what the clock tells him. Both the one on his bedside table and the one on his phone. Really? Taemin rubs his eyes with his free hand, and when he opens them again he notices there’s a message under it too. Taemin’s eyes blur over the name, already swiping it open.

_did you mean to send that to your boyfriend?_

Hyuuuuuuuuuung. Taemin rolls over and smashes his face into the pillow, but instead of melting into the mattress, his body lays there uselessly, stiff and aching. His ears are worse, and his cheeks, his neck, just all of him, flushing red hot for no reason. Jonghyun is so stupid, he always says stuff like that, and then Taemin has to deal with it. Or not. He could just fall back asleep and ignore him and when he woke up, maybe Jonghyun would have sent him ten more messages and forgotten he ever wanted an answer to that one. It’s amazing he’s still on the first one, after two whole hours. Did he just send it or something?

It’s from five minutes after Taemin sent the selca. Which isn’t even that weird. Jonghyun has seen him in bed ten billion times. They shared a room for five years, and it’s not even that weird for them to share the same bed. Jonghyun used to give Taemin his arm for a pillow and hold him while he slept, and the rare times Taemin woke up and found Jonghyun asleep himself, he’d lie there forever, too scared to move in case it woke him up. And when Jonghyun finally opened his eyes, he’d have seen exactly what Taemin sent him. Puffy eyes, chapped lips, pimple at the corner of his mouth he’s been trying not to pick at for days. The exact opposite of sexy.

_im wearing clothes_

It’s been hours, but Taemin barely types it out when Jonghyun is already replying with the reminder, _you slept naked when we shared a room taeminnie._ Has he been sitting here waiting all this time just to say that? Probably not. It’s not like texting Taemin is the only thing his phone is good for. He probably forgot all about him, surfing the Internet, catching up with friends, debating whether to answer his mom’s latest message, or whether it’s okay to stop texting her first if he already has. But he barely gives Taemin five seconds to respond to that before he adds, _in case you forgot._

Taemin always wears pajamas now, but back then he didn’t own any. Which was normal. It’s not like Jonghyun did, either, and he probably still doesn’t.

_last time you said youd seen me so many times that you couldnt_

_besides i look ugly. why would i want my bf to see_

Taemin shouldn’t have sent that, and not just because his boyfriend dumped him a week ago. He already knows what Jonghyun is going to say from years of him saying the same thing:

_but you wanted me to. it was cute_

_you are_

If it were anyone else it wouldn’t mean anything. But it’s not, it’s Jonghyun. Taemin’s fingers move on their own, flicking over to the camera app. When it focuses on his face he finds a mistake looking back at him, bedhead on top of everything else, but that doesn’t stop him from snapping another photo and sending it to Jonghyun anyway. Or asking, _how about now._

Jonghyun barely needs a second to pass judgement:

_cuter_

_dont send that one to him. he doesnt deserve it_

That proves nothing except that Jonghyun is blind, and Taemin is too easy. Way too easy. Lying on his stomach doesn’t squish down the stupid feeling bubbling up inside it, and even with his face buried in his pillow, his everything buried under the last week of his life, he can’t hide from his own smile. It’s not like Jonghyun isn’t here to see, either. He rolls out into the open, body protesting the whole way.

 _im not sending him any i already said,_ Taemin taps out. Because he broke up with him, but he wouldn’t have anyway. Even after knowing his face from Mubank, Dongwook probably took so long to recognize him at church because he wasn’t wearing makeup, and the only reason Taemin ever got brave enough to go on dates without any on is because he’s never learned to do his own.

 _this taeminnie is all mine,_ Jonghyun is telling him. _the you only hyung gets to see~_

He’s so dumb. Taemin is dumber, though. His smile widens.

_pay me back_

_cant take photos here. its a matter of national security taeminah_

He’s lying, he has to be. He’s impossible. If he’s not going to roll over and go back to sleep for a hundred years, Taemin should get up, go brush his teeth, do something about his hair, see if he can find breakfast without bothering Mooyeol hyung, anything but lie here too-hot under the blankets, staring at his phone and waiting for Jonghyun to sneak him one of those blurry selcas he always takes, along with a dumb excuse. _Hyung risked it all for you_ or _my hair has grown since you last saw me~_ or _whatever you say, i already know i look handsome in uniform,_ or something so him even Taemin can’t come up with it.

 _you look tired._ That last thing. Of course he wouldn’t say anything about himself, Taemin should have known better. Taemin’s smile fades from his face, but his heart doesn’t slow down or pick up, just keeps beating, same as it has all week. _filming was hard right?_

_how did you know?_

Did Taemin tell him it would be today? Or yesterday. And the day before. It’s all jumbled up in his head, but somehow continents away, without phone privileges for most of the day, Jonghyun still knows his schedule better than he does.

 _you dont?_ Jonghyun says. Pauses. Then:

_theres a clip of you online_

_you got caught. they didnt recognize you, you were so pretty they wanted to find out who you are. now i have to share you with france too._

And as the bottom drops out of Taemin’s stomach:

_dont worry. it doesnt even count as a spoiler, its only a few seconds not enough to see the choreo. you cant even hear the song_

_im sorry i told you like that. i wasnt thinking_

Within another few seconds Jonghyun has the link at Taemin’s fingertips. It’s only after he’s watched it a hundred times, turning the volume up as high as it will go and straining his ears to hear any telltale notes of 2 Kids, that other details filter in. It’s from Twitter, all in English. Jonghyun has had an account on there for years and lurked in the fandom for even longer, but now he’s progressed to languages he doesn’t even understand. Unless it’s all over the fandom already? Taemin’s stomach tightens, but he ignores it.

_is the army that boring?_

He already knows it’s the exact wrong thing when he hits send, and immediately Jonghyun is retorting like he’s supposed to, _im not just any fan taeminah. this is the most basic of the basics._

Sometimes it feels as though Taemin knows even less than that about Jonghyun’s life anymore, but if he tries to ask about him, Jonghyun will turn it around and pester him with questions and assurances until he gets cut off at ten p.m. What time is it there, anyway? Taemin’s jetlag got swallowed up in the day and night they spent shooting, and his phone changed time zones automatically.

_there was no choreo to spoil. not for this one_

There. Jonghyun will see that and read “it’s fine.” If Taemin just wrote that he’d probably read it as “console me, hyung” instead. And now there’s nothing else to say. Taemin really is fine. It was only five seconds of a three and a half minute MV. And of the 48 hours he worked on it, the week he waited to see if they would make it to Paris at all, the year he’s waited to release it after recording.

_jinki hyung keeps acting like he forgot how to use technology,_ he writes. 

Taemin’s heart skips a beat, waiting for Jonghyun to answer, but then he just says, _he doesnt answer your messages?_

_he just talks about the army. they all do, even kibum hyung_

_its hard when you wont talk about yourself taeminnie. theres nothing else to say_

Just when Taemin thought he had gotten out of it. He could say the first stupid thing that comes to mind, and Jonghyun would reply, and keep replying, until Taemin ran out finally, or he fell back asleep or got up, wandered off, forgot to say goodbye. The first time Jonghyun ever stopped replying first was when the army took his phone away from him. What does he want to hear? That he doesn’t know when Jonghyun will be able to see the MV, and Director-nim hasn’t called about venues or his comeback since they left? Or that Taemin is tired and sore and his heart hurts more than the rest of him put together, and he smiled for real for the first time in who knows how long this morning, thanks to Jonghyun.

_it was freezing last night. and rainy_

Taemin reads it over ten times before he lets himself hit send, and then he lies there and tries not to die. But maybe Jonghyun will convince himself that Taemin really might, and at the barest thought he’s adding in this painful rush, _didnt catch cold dont worry. u dont get sick either hyung_

There. Or not. His fingers move by themselves.

_its supposed to be sunny tmrw. im filming again._

_vcr for concert. sightseeing concept_

_theres no point right_

Okay. He can shut up now. Or at least breathe while he waits for Jonghyun to respond to all those things no one needed to hear. He burrows deeper into his blankets, drawing his legs up to his chest and curling into a ball, squeezing his eyes shut so tight it almost hurts. In the next second his phone buzzes in his hand, sending tingles all through his body. It’s like he has to make himself look. Or let himself.

_whenever we went to paris we just stayed in the hotel. i regret that now_

Just like that, Taemin does too. So much he aches. Not today, the times he came here with Shinee. The other three always went out and made memories, while he and Jonghyun slept in or practiced.

_see all the sights taeminnie. open your eyes and your heart. then next time we go you can show hyung around_

He’s so dumb.

_i just go where they tell me hyung. i dont have time to look at anything besides the camera_

It’s only as he types it that it starts to feel like a lie.

_everything is so normal here compared to seoul. its weird_

_i feel so weird. i almost wish i could stay but then i get scared about making it home. what if they dont let us back in? i know im being stupid_

_it feels like forever since we saw each other doesnt it?_

Really stupid. Taemin’s face burns. Again, he thinks about getting up, saying something else faster than Jonghyun can answer, just anything, and again, he lies here and waits instead, staring at his phone until the screen starts to burn into his eyes.

 _when i looked at you i felt like i was there with you,_ Jonghyun says. _your picture. both of them_

Does he mean in bed with him? Taemin’s stomach flips over weirdly. This one is so huge that they could both sleep in it and never touch, but they’d probably wake up in the middle anyway, tangled up in each other. If Jonghyun slept at all, if he didn’t lie there and sneak glances at Taemin all night, or turn away from him and huddle under the blanket, trying to shield him from the glare of his phone. What does he do in the military, just lie there and stare at the ceiling?

Just as Taemin was thinking that, he was smiling his crinkly-eyed smile. That’s what the selca he sent Taemin just now tells him. Taemin doesn’t recognize the room over his shoulder, or the guys who wandered into the frame behind him, but who cares about any of that. _You look more tired than me,_ he could say. The circles under Jonghyun’s eyes are darker than when he saw him last. _Did I make you smile, too? You can’t fake that one._

 _in case it works for you too,_ Jonghyun says before Taemin can even start to type. _ill trap you here with me~_

When Taemin wakes up fourteen hours later, his phone is still in his hand. That day the sun shines like summer on Paris.

Four days after that, it’s like winter inside SM. It always is. Outside, the last of the ice has melted from the sidewalk, but Taemin’s heart is freezing over again. The meeting is set for nine a.m., too early for Taemin to sleep in after his night flight from London, too late for him to burn off the wait in the practice room. Mooyeol hyung stopped to buy kimbap on the way, desperate after days without Korean food, and they eat their way through the bag on the leather couch in Creative’s lobby. They don’t taste like home to Taemin, they taste like nothing. When it’s time finally, Mooyeol hyung sends him off with a hushed, “Fighting!” over the top of his book, and as soon as he steps into the room, it’s like no time has passed at all since the last time. When Director-nim asks him about Paris, Taemin feels like he never even went. But he did, and “2 Kids” is all the proof anyone here needs. Director-nim tells him they’ve received a draft of the MV, that they’re happy with what they’ve seen, that the PD was full of praise for Taemin and wanted to work with him again. That they’re in talks with his production company to move the editing in-house.

What would have been the work of three sleepless days and nights will become a process lasting months, in other words. SM doesn’t need to save time anymore. They can just save money. If their words rise up like a wall, Taemin is the one who walks right into it. He feels the hit with his whole body, everything inside him jarring out of place and then staying that way. They’ll have to hit him harder to get it all to fall back where it should, except this time Taemin knows it’s coming:

“We had to push you back.”

He should have known before he even woke up today. Before he flew to Paris. All the way back when he first pushed to film an MV for “2 Kids,” all those months of meetings just like this one. Further back than that, even. From the beginning.

That’s not fair. If it weren’t for Covid, he would be in the middle of concert prep right now, squeezing fittings and teaser photoshoots and video calls with Creative in between sets. But he’s not. The last two weeks of his life have led him here.

Taemin swallows hard. “How far?”

Director-nim sighs, rocking back in his chair. “We’ll talk again in April.”

“Last time you told me we would talk when I got back.”

It’s out of Taemin’s mouth before he can stop himself, and then it hangs in the air, heavy as rain. His face burns and his stomach twists up, but Director-nim smiles.

“I understand your frustration, believe me,” he says. “Things were up in the air when you left, and this is the way they landed.”

“What about ‘Idea?’”

Another stupid question, if the look on Director-nim’s face is anything to go by, but he couldn’t not ask.

“Mooyeol-ssi didn’t tell you? Or maybe we didn’t tell him.” He glances around at his staff. The maknae opens her mouth, apology already forming, but he waves her off, saying in her stead, “Sorry, everything is a mess. It must have fallen through the cracks somehow.” He clears his throat. “The PD pulled out.”

Did he ever even sign on? But that not important, not anymore. Taemin needs to focus. “What now?”

“We’re looking for another one,” the assistant director tells him. Her pause lasts a moment too long and crushes in on Taemin. “It might take a while.”

“So will my comeback,” Taemin shouldn’t be saying. He’s been going to these meetings for ten years and hearing shit he didn’t want to hear for even longer, so how is he still so bad at this? How are his hands shaking, after everything. He folds them together under the table and goes on blindly. “Realistically, you’re going to say the same thing in April that you’re saying now, right? And in May…”

Director-nim laughs, of all things, this dry brittle sound that could turn to dust. Some of the staffers smile tiredly in response, but Taemin has no idea what this thing on his face is. Just that it doesn’t belong there.

“If I knew I would tell you now,” Director-nim says, almost gently. “It’s hard enough taking things day-by-day in this environment, Taemin-ah. Month-by-month is almost impossible. You’ll have to forgive us for that.”

Day-by-day is hard for Taemin, too. Getting up for no reason, going to work for no reason, eating and sleeping for no reason, going to bed knowing he’ll do it all over again. And right now he’s down to minute-by-minute, second-by-second, each tick of the clock crawling under his skin, this sick awful feeling rising up. If he doesn’t fight it back down, it’ll end up all over them, and for what?

“There’s nothing to forgive,” Taemin makes himself say. “It’s a mess, like you said.”

Director-nim sighs again heavily, rubbing at his temples and leaning back in his chair again.

“You’d think this company could hire people to keep pace with the groups they debut, but the reality is we barely have enough staff to cover one group at a time, and there’s always overlap,” he says. “You’d know from experience – even without the pandemic, our ability to plan is for shit. With it…”

Taemin understands, already. There’s nothing more to say.

Except somehow Taemin is asking again. “Who else has something ready to drop?”

“Everyone,” one of the staffers says. “And if they don’t, they’re working on it.”

What Taemin hears is, _The entire company could end up going before you._ NCT 127 will have a repackage, and there’s Dream and WayV too, Baekhyun has been playing his songs for Taemin since the American leg of their tour, Junmyeon’s goodbye album is in post-production already, Changmin is recording, Taeyeon will be, Boa’s twentieth anniversary, the Red Velvet subunit…

When Taemin first auditioned, his dad told him to come here because it was a big company. He wouldn’t go into debt to pay off his training, and they’d take care of him for a long time. And they will. Even if the time in between is the part that stretches out forever.

“Can you really make up for concerts with physical releases?” Taemin says. “I figured if you’d found a venue you would have told us, but if you’d stopped looking you wouldn’t.”

“There are only so many places in this country that can hold your size crowd, Taemin-ah. We exhausted all our options.” Director-nim hesitates. “Well, not all. We’re looking into moving them online. We’ll talk about this again when we call SuperM in to meet, but the company is setting something up with Naver. If worse comes to worst, you can finish your tour in Seoul instead of Tokyo.”

He leaves the rest unspoken: _That’s better than not having it at all, right?_

Is it? Even good news is bad news. Or at least that’s how it feels to him. What is wrong with Taemin? Besides everything.

“Where would you film it?” he makes himself ask.

“We’ll build a set.”

“No audience?”

His stupidest question yet, but no one laughs.

“A virtual one. We could set up fan interactions, video calls or something. It’s very early, Taemin-ah, the details are still being worked out. You can think of SuperM as a trial run for Never Gonna Dance Again.” Director-nim’s eyes linger on his face, reading all the things Taemin doesn’t know how to hide. “You don’t look happy.”

How could he be?

“It’s not the same.”

Short silence. Then, almost gently, “Nothing is, Taemin-ah.”

Somehow they’ve both spent this entire meeting telling each other things they already know. Taemin is sick of it. Of everything. These four walls, so white it hurts to look at, the polite not-smiles on all their faces, the concert they’re asking him to rip up and fit into their box, the album no one has heard, the MV they’ll leave in pieces for months and the one that won’t get filmed, the day he’s going to have after this. The way he feels right now. Taemin can’t hate any of them for any of it, so instead he sits here and hates himself. And his life. And every single thing in it.

“I didn’t mean that as a complaint, just as a fact,” he says finally. “‘Heaven,’ ‘Identity’…There are a lot of performances that would be hard to replicate in that format.”

He should have said impossible.

“There are ways to work around that, Taemin-ah,” one of them says right away. “And if you can’t, you can change the set list.”

The one thing he can’t change is himself. He won’t.

“We’ll see.”

“We will,” Director-nim says. “And in the meantime, we need to find ways to keep you relevant.”

He means content. Taemin wants to tell him he doesn’t care, that they can decide without him and he’ll do whatever they say, same as always. He wants to put his head down and sleep for a thousand years and wake up in the meeting where they give him a date. He doesn’t want to do this anymore. He’d rather people forget that he exists until his album drops, than try and stay in the back of their heads like this. If he could not exist for real until then, even better.

_youll have to wait a while longer hyung_

The week wears on, so Taemin’s life does too. Each day is the same as the last, and when the morning of his would-be concert dawns, nothing is any different. Taemin gets up when his alarm rings. Showers. Brushes his teeth. The mirror over the sink is fogged up with steam, but it does nothing to soften his reflection, pale and puffy-eyed, circles under them as dark as his hair is now that he’s dyed it black. _like my heart,_ he told Jonghyun when he sent yesterday’s selca on the way to work. It was supposed to be funny, but when have his feelings ever been a joke to Jonghyun? No matter how much they should be. He turned his phone off minutes later and handed it to Mooyeol hyung, already knowing it would stay in the back of his head all day. When they reached the practice room at last, he burned through warmups, then danced so hard he could tell himself his heart was pounding from that, but whenever one of the dancers told him, _Yah, let’s take a break, Taemin-ah, I’m dying here,_ Taemin really felt like he was. It’s as hard to breathe now as it was sprawled out on the practice room floor, when he climbs into the van and Mooyeol hyung hands him his phone and tells him instead of good morning, “You left it with me yesterday. I forgot until I tried to call you this morning.”

Taemin stuffs it in his pocket and tries to forget about it. Nothing outside his window stares back, even when they hit every red light between his building and SM.

“What about filming more casually?” Mooyeol hyung says, glancing over at him. He means the other day. Content. Variety. Keep Taemin Relevant Challenge. Nothing to smile about, but he’s never let that stop him before. “The daily life of Lee Taemin.”

“All I do is eat and sleep. Who would want to watch that?” Taemin crosses his arms over his chest, ignoring his heart squeezing in on itself like it’s trying to hide. That’s all it ever does these days. “I’m not filming myself practicing, I’m not spoiling my own song. It’s bad enough I got caught filming ‘2 Kids.’”

Mooyeol hyung shoots him a reproachful look, like Taemin should have known he didn’t mean it like that.

“I’ve seen some of the stuff new groups put out and this kind of thing is really popular these days. Just clips of you doing normal things. Having a meal, going shopping, sitting in the car doing nothing...”

“You know how boring I am better than anyone, hyung,” Taemin shouldn’t even have to say. He’s spent the last ten minutes grunting at every conversation starter Mooyeol hyung tries, and tonight he should be too tired to talk. And he’s other things, too, selfish and ungrateful and bitter at everything, and no matter how hard he tries to keep them inside, his feelings keep spilling out somehow. Only Jonghyun would ever find every side of him cute, but even if he’s Taemin’s first and last fan, he can’t fill arenas on his own or buy enough albums to keep his career alive. If Covid doesn’t kill it first.

Mooyeol hyung probably knows half the things in his head, but he still says, “They can edit it.”

_They can’t edit who I really am. I don’t want to show everything, hyung._

“And add funny subtitles? That’s on trend lately, too.” Mooyeol hyung’s smile widens, like he thinks he’s tricked Taemin into getting on board. It’d be too mean to tell him it’s because he doesn’t care, right? Taemin makes a face at him. “You’re not the only one who keeps up with stuff.”

Instead of giving him a reaction or changing the subject, Mooyeol hyung presses him, “Your fans never get to see this side of you, Taemin-ah. You don’t have to film at home if you don’t want, this job comes with a lot of downtime.”

“Maybe for you.”

Mooyeol hyung laughs, full and loud and open as ever, and then that’s it. Silence finally. Even he’s run out of things to say. He should know from years stuck in traffic with Taemin that it’s easier for him not to talk. Or maybe it’s just too hard to think of anything to say. The air goes dead and each moment stretches between them, building inside Taemin, this white echoing blank as wide and empty as the sky. It’s so blue it hurts to look at, and the sun is shining down on them so brightly, just like it did that day in Paris.

_Open your eyes and your heart, Taeminnie._

“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” Taemin says.

Mooyeol hyung shoots him yet another smile. Taemin catches this one in the corner of his eye, already focusing in on the screen of his phone as it wakes up. He can’t ignore Jonghyun’s name as it pops up, so he ignores that part of himself, his heart grinding to a stop in his chest, then picking up twice as fast as he blindly flicks open his camera instead. If he waited another ten minutes, he could take a photo of the sky without the glare of the windshield, but Jonghyun will get this weather tomorrow anyway, and he can see it for himself then. And Taemin can barely last through the click and flash he thought he had turned off, before his fingers move on their own, following his heart.

His selca is even worse than he remembers, but he’s not seeing himself through Jonghyun’s eyes. He can’t, he never could.

_grow it out too_

_give it a nice life before you bleach it again_

_or dont_

_you look so pretty with it black. its been so long, my heart fluttered~_

_if hyung asked would you keep it for your comeback_

And ten minutes after that, after waiting for the reply he must have realized would never arrive:

_itll come taeminnie. as surely as spring will_

Summer, maybe. Or fall. Maybe next winter. Spring is already here. Taemin sends him the sky, blue and endless, then sits back and stares into the real thing instead of the hole opening back up inside him.

There’s nothing in his life that can fill it, least of all the sight of SM looming over them as Mooyeol hyung pulls into his parking spot, or the rush of cold air that greets them as he descends down the basement stairs to the practice room. The day after his meeting with SM, they wanted to know if they’d stopped searching for a venue for Never Gonna Dance Again, and Taemin had to tell them they wouldn’t even make it to a stage as small as Inkigayo or Music Bank’s. Some of them have been dancing for him as far back Off-Sick, and even the new people started last summer, which seems like years and years ago now. In all that time, how often have they heard from him that the comeback was delayed, or this concert was pushed back? SM’s plate was too full, there was no money in the quarterly budget for Taemin, Capitol Records wanted to expedite SuperM’s debut, and then there was the tour. At every turn, they’ve told him it was okay, they understood, they’d work even harder to make everything perfect when they could finally bring “Idea” into the world. But this time is different. Maybe there were a thousand things someone smarter or stronger than Taemin could have said or done in the past, but he could fight the company until it kills him now, and he’d end up nowhere. And they could end up worse than that. The ones who’ve been here long enough will probably get shuffled to another artist, but everyone else will get let go. If they don’t quit first.

They’ve been living with that all week, but it’s not until their break today that one of them asks for the first time, “Is there a point to us being here? Guess SM is so rich it’s nothing to pay us to practice a song we’ll never perform.”

Someone who’s been here long enough to know laughs breathlessly. “Less than nothing. This choreography cost more than a house, Najung-ah, and they’re fine sitting on it.”

More than all their salaries combined. Since the beginning SM has always let Taemin work with the very best, and with each month that passed without releasing “Idea,” Taemin went to another choreographer friend for advice, then friends of friends, people whose work he admired, searching for any tiny detail that could bring him closer to perfection. The Performance Director never said no to bringing any of them on board, and Creative never said yes about anything else. That’s where all Taemin’s money went.

Should he do the same with his album? There are ten songs on the cutting room floor already, but hundreds in SM’s vaults, and the A&R team is used to him wasting their time. But the dancers are by now, too, and somehow all he can think about is himself.

“SM is discussing how to produce online concerts, but it’d be difficult to translate our stages into that format.” Taemin hates himself even as he says it. He should. He’s a liar for not mentioning it last time, and if it’s giving them false hope, that’s only because of his own selfishness. His dream died weeks ago already, but he’d still rather die with it than wake up and strip it down to basics. “They want to test it out on SuperM first, and then I should get a better idea if it’s even possible for us. Sorry I don’t know more than that.”

Najung’s lips press into one long thin line. “What about the MV?”

If she’s the first person to ask, that’s only because they all know the answer already. Stuck in pre-production until SM can find another PD. Until they feel like looking. Maybe she reads it in Taemin’s face, because she sighs and scrubs her hands over her own, saying into them.

“Should I leave the room for five minutes and let you guys curse me~?” Taemin’s only half joking. Half of him wishes they would. “I’m sorry. Really. There aren’t words.”

More like Taemin doesn’t know them. They’re all crowding in his chest where his heart should be, this dark endless blur, too many to see. And if he cracked himself open and showed it to them all, he’d be too much. Even if this is more than a job for them, it’s not twelve years of their lives. It’s not the one single reason they get up in the morning and go to bed at night and take care of their body, or the reason they lie awake, alone in the dark. And none of them are lying here thinking like their life is some kind of drama or something. Taemin resists the urge to roll over onto his stomach and hide in the fold of his arms, struggling to his feet. They all hate him more for that than anything, groaning and cursing and pleading for five more minutes.

“It’s not something you can control, oppa,” Najung says, pushing herself up to stand next to him. “Neither this situation or SM.”

She would know. They all would. How useless Taemin is. How little he can do for them.

He stays long after the last of them have filtered out with good nights and see you’s and _you’re insane, Taemin-ah, working this late even now,_ until finally Mooyeol hyung wakes up from his nap on the couch down the hall and drags him out of the practice room. On the way back to Taemin’s place, he talks about everything and nothing, while Taemin sits there and lets another day settle into his body, muscles burning, legs cramping, sweat finally drying. He forgets his phone until he’s made it to his bed, hours and hours after Jonghyun had to give up his phone for the day. He’s sent Taemin a picture, too. The moon and the stars.

_theyre so much brighter here than in seoul_

Taemin forgot to even look up at the sky on his way out, and his windows are too far away to see, but here they are in his hand. So tiny his entire palm could block out the sky, so close that he could reach out and touch them. If he doesn’t, they’ll fall asleep before him.

As the screen dims, Taemin closes his eyes. With him.

It’s buzzing. Ringing. Phone. In his hand. Fuck. There’s only one person who’d call this late. Or early?

“Jonghyunnie hyuuuung. I told you not to call me when you’re drunk.”

“One of the dancers leaked ‘Idea,’” Mooyeol hyung’s voice tells him.

Taemin’s eyes snap open.

Daylight comes flooding in, so bright it blinds him. That or the pain. The last year and a half he’s spent alone falling on him all at once, how much of it with this fucking song. It’s only three words, but Taemin has to rip each one out of his heart: “All of it?”

“Part.”

“Of the song?”

“And the choreo.” Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuckFUCK. “It’s a video clip, Taeminnie. Not even half a minute.”

That’s like a quarter of the song or something. And the dance practice, if it’s from that. But Mooyeol hyung would have said, he would have told Taemin right away. Then what? The dance practice, the ten different versions they’ve filmed as the choreo changed. He’s never taken a video, not even to show the hyungs, and his phone is right here anyway, no one stole it. He’s being so stupid, and his heart is slamming against his ribs, so loud he can’t hear himself think.

He can’t think.

“Where is this even coming from, DC Inside?”

The split second Mooyeol hyung hesitates splits his chest open. “One of the dancers.”

Taemin doesn’t understand. He needs to hear it again. He needs to wake up. He can’t do this anymore. This. His career. His life.

Taemin pushes himself upright. “Who?”

“SM already—”

“Who, hyung?”

“Im Najung.”

The only one who was even asking him for anything anymore. Taemin could never have guessed it was any of them, but after everything, they all would have made sense. Taemin waits for it to mean something, and then he lies there and waits for the last half year he’s spent with this song to mean less. And then he just breathes. Mooyeol hyung doesn’t say the things Taemin already knows. That he has every right to be angry, that he can take it all out on Mooyeol hyung, hang up or lash out. That the damage is already done. That it’s not as bad as he thinks, that his fans won’t look out of loyalty, and no one else will see it either, out of indifference. That he should focus on the things he can control.

Which is nothing.

“Take the day off,” Taemin says.

“It’s still too cold to walk, Taemin-ah,” Mooyeol hyung starts up, but Taemin cuts him off.

“I’m tired, is all.”

When he lies back down, his bed is as soft as it was before. Too soft. Everything hurts more.

“Do you want me to come over?” Mooyeol hyung should be yelling at him to come in anyway, but then he wouldn’t be himself. And he knows Taemin too well. “You want to be alone?”

“Mm.”

“SM already got rid of it,” Mooyeol hyung says in this rush, almost like he’s apologizing. If Taemin told him it’s not his fault he’d probably skip telling him, “Not just on her Instagram, her phone too. The Performance Director is furious,” and go straight to, _I’m still sorry. It’s been a long year for me, too._

“I’m gonna hang up now, okay?” Taemin swallows hard. “Don’t call me again today. I won’t answer.”

“I will. You call me if you need anything.”

The things Taemin needs are the same things that everyone does. Sleep, food, water, money. Everything else is just greed. His heart hurts so much it feels like he could die, but it’s beating just like normal. He’s young and healthy, and even if he gets sick, he’ll probably live. Today will pass and tomorrow will come, and the next day, the day after that, until this feeling is only a memory. If he even remembers it.

But for now…for now.

Taemin can’t fall back asleep. It’s too much to even try, somehow. So he just lies there. Time will pass with or without him. Looking at his phone is worse than looking at his ceiling, but he stays offline and stares into the sky Jonghyun gave him. Last night he only had eyes for the stars and moon, white and glittering, but today in the daylight, all he can see is darkness, blacker than black. If he scrolled back up through Jonghyun’s texts, after a year of delays and disappointment, he wouldn’t have to go far to find all the things he’d say if he knew what had happened, but they’re already right here. Stabbing into his heart. Snapping him in half.

_I’m sorry, Taemin-ah. There’s nothing hyung can say or do for you, and I’m sorry for that too._

The one single thing Taemin could do for Jonghyun is not put his shit on him yet again, but his fingers move on their own.

_one of my dancers leaked idea._

_you wouldnt know her, she joined after you went in_

_mooyeol hyung said they took it down but its probably everywhere already_

_i worked on that song for half a fucking year_

_dont go online today hyung youre not allowed to see it_

There. His mood is worse instead of better, and now he’s sent it to Jonghyun, and as it sits in his inbox, it’ll probably mutate, grow more infectious, more deadly. Jonghyun is the one who’s always telling him to tell him things. Maybe those weren’t the words crushing down on him, cracking his spine, breaking his legs, cutting off all other feeling. maybe Taemin should have dug deeper, ripped his heart in half. Said worse.

Or he can get out of bed. Get dressed. Watch a movie? Something stupid, that Minho would make fun of him for. Junk food. Taemin gets some of that from the fridge, too, all the leftovers he shouldn’t have from late night takeout Mooyeol hyung tempted him into, and mixes it into the last of his rice. How can he help it if the only things that taste good are all bad for him? Even if it tastes like nothing today. He takes it back to the couch and eats. And stares into the TV screen. And eats. He picked something in English and left the subtitles off, but he never even learns the names of the characters. SuperM’s London concert feels like a lifetime ago, but it’s barely been two weeks since then. Three since his own concert was canceled.

_its been half a year for her too. all the dancers. theyre all so frustrated_

Another thing Jonghyun doesn’t need to hear from him. Another thing he didn’t need to say. It feels like being stabbed. If he pulls the blade out now he’ll spray blood all over Jonghyun, that’s what always happens in the movies he’s actually watched. And then the room would spin as he grew even weaker, until he passed out and didn’t wake up, and he could miss all Jonghyun’s replies. Or something. He’s being so stupid, thinking these things. Typing them.

_its not just sm its me too_

_I should be a joke to them. theyre all trapped in the practice room with me and im the one who cant get sm to move_

_no matter how hard i try i cant do anything_

_im shit,_ Taemin starts to type, then deletes it twice as fast. Instead of hitting pause he fumbles for the remote and hits the power button, then forces himself up again. Going for a walk would mean getting dressed, checking himself in the mirror to see if he could live with anyone else seeing him, but the answer is already grinding in his chest, locking his legs, opening his stomach up. He paces around his apartment instead, around around around, hitting walls at every turn, until he’s not sure if this feeling is chasing him or he’s chasing it. He bought this place last year after all the hyungs went into the military, so Jonghyun has never even been here. He couldn’t picture what Taemin is doing right now, how he looks, but with the way Taemin keeps texting him he’ll probably imagine something so much worse. Someplace dark and tiny and locked up tight, not all this open space, sunlight streaming in to fill the emptiness.

_still its not right_

_i trusted her hyung. was that stupid_

Taemin is. So, so stupid. What is the point in going around in circles like this? What is the point of lying in bed when he’s not asleep. What is the point of being awake. What is the point of trying to hide from his life when each breath he takes is a reminder that he’s living it. Im Najung’s number is in his phone, same as all the other dancers, and if no one’s kicked her out she’s still in their group chat too. There’s nothing stopping him from calling her, texting her, asking her to explain herself, yelling at her, but he’d just end up telling her things he should be telling himself.

Instead he’s telling Jonghyun.

_idk if sm fired her. If they didnt i will. i cant work with someone like that. even if i understand her_

_thats worse_

_i dont want to understand. i never wanted anyone to see me like this. its bad enough i have to live with myself_

After he sent that, too. Taemin curls into a ball so tight he can barely breathe. Inhales and exhales. Listens to the silence and thinks about listening to music instead, dialing up the volume until it breaks down into noise. Screws his eyes shut. His phone burns his eyelids red, but before it can even fade to black, he’s back to staring at it again. When Jonghyun sees the number of messages alone he’ll probably have a heart attack. Taemin has lost track. Of everything.

_im so tired hyung. i cant do this anymore_

Everything except the time. It’s only 4:30. The soonest Jonghyun will get his phone is five, so Taemin has until then to figure out how to delete everything. Instead he lies here some more. Forever. It’s not like Taemin has never whined to Jonghyun before, and he’s always known every tiny thing that’s gone wrong in Taemin’s life without him ever saying anything, since the time Taemin was thirteen years old. He’s twenty-eight now, and he still hasn’t found a way to look back into Jonghyun’s heart, or to hide his own. He’s so useless.

_Don’t reply, hyung. Don’t be so nice to me. I hate it. I hate you._

That’s such a lie he can barely think it before he burns with shame. He can’t even hate himself in peace, when Jonghyun loves him so much. He’s never given him a single reason. When they first met it took Taemin months to talk to him at all, and now he says so many things he shouldn’t, and this whole time, all he’s ever done is take and take and take. The one thing he even knows to give Jonghyun is to stop taking, and he can’t even do that. Even now. Especially now.

Six. Six thirty. Seven.

_Please, hyung._

Taemin picks up on the first ring. His heart is hammering and his hand, his whole body is shaking, and he didn’t even check to see if it was him.

“Taeminnie—”

At the sound of Jonghyun’s voice Taemin lives and dies.

“Don’t say anything, hyung,” comes rushing out of him. “Sorry for the spam. I was bored at home all day.”

Silence, the kind that turns Taemin inside out. Then, so gently it hurts everywhere, “Did you eat?”

“Too much,” is where Taemin should cut himself off. “Not like it matters, I’m off my diet.”

“I never get why they put you on one,” Jonghyun says, so normally Taemin wants to curl up and die all over again. “You’re so skinny.”

“It’s my face that’s the problem, you know that.”

Instead of laughing and saying _you know how many people would kill to have your problem,_ telling him _your cheeks are like dumplings. Cute enough to eat~,_ or another one of the equally stupid things he always comes up with, Jonghyun asks, “What did you have?”

Did he call just to say that? This is so stupid. Jonghyun probably spent all day doing military drills and surviving off cafeteria food, same as every other one. The one thing Taemin knows for sure is that they won’t let him forget to eat there.

“I don’t know, leftovers. Bibimbap.” Taemin tries smiling, but it’s a mistake. Jonghyun will hear how fake it is. “I should have told you that I had takeout, made you really jealous. Jokbal or something.”

“You brat,” Jonghyun accuses him like he’s supposed to. Then like he isn’t, he goes back to asking. “Why didn’t you?”

The leftovers would have gone to waste. Taemin wasn’t hungry. He was too lazy to decide where to order from. Anything but, “I don’t want anyone to see me like this. Even the deliveryman.”

“Taeminnie…”

At the sound of his own name, even gentler than before, Taemin’s entire body twists up so tight he can barely find the space to exist. He wishes he didn’t. And he wishes he could stop thinking shit like that. He’s the one making Jonghyun worry.

“You said I never talk about myself, but all I ever do is whine at you, and that just makes it worse. I hate myself more,” Taemin gets out. He sounds so normal to his own ears, but maybe that’s worse, that’s how Jonghyun will start thinking something is really wrong. “Let’s not talk about it, okay?”

He already knows that won’t work, even before Jonghyun says, “You always say talking doesn’t help for you, but that’s because you won’t let it, Taeminnie.”

“I’m fine.”

“It’s okay if you’re not.”

_It’s not. I’m not okay. I can’t spend another day like this, but it’ll probably be even harder to go in tomorrow. I have to look them in the face, hyung. And I should probably talk to her, too, right? Ask her why she did it, and then tell her there’s no excuse, whatever she says._

Taemin has three of them: SM, Covid, and himself. He can only do something about the last one. Taemin takes a deep breath.

“I will be,” he says. Taemin uncurls from his ball, turning onto his back, tingling burn dancing up and down his muscles as he stretches his legs out. When he presses his phone closer to his ear, he can almost hear Jonghyun’s breathing, 50 miles away and right here. “The army must be a lot harder than SM.”

“You’re so hard on yourself,” Jonghyun says immediately, because he’s him, and then, “You ever think maybe that’s harder on me?” The hardest thing on Taemin is when Jonghyun tells him things like that, but neither of them can help it. They’ve been having this conversation from the time Jonghyun caught him crying over the line he lost in Replay and cursed SM to comfort him, and Taemin told him through his tears that no one took anything away from him, it was his own fault for not being good enough. Jonghyun held him until the last sob left his body that day, but it’s been years since the last time Taemin let himself cry, even longer since the last time he let Jonghyun see, and he’s not here with him now. Even if Taemin can picture the exact face he’s making as he goes back to answering the things Taemin did say, instead of the things he didn’t. “And it’s really not, everything is too easy here. They say what they mean, and if you do what you’re told you never have to think about any of it.”

“What about if you don’t?”

Taemin was being serious, but Jonghyun laughs, warm and soft in Taemin’s ear. “Not all of us are as cute as you, Taemin-ah. Hyung can’t get away with anything.”

Just ten minutes ago Taemin felt like he’d never smile again, but that’s what this thing on his face is, right? Jonghyun isn’t here to check for him.

“That’s not the Jonghyunnie hyung I know,” he says. “You always got away with everything.”

“Not with you,” Jonghyun replies, of all things. It’s not a reproach or an accusation, just another one of those things he says. “It only counts if you pretend not to know, not if you really don’t. You could never even guess half the time.”

What is he even talking about, the things he won’t talk about? He’s impossible.

“Would it have done any good? There are things you tell me and things you don’t. There’s nothing I can do to make you, I’ve tried it all.”

“Have you?”

Taemin takes a second too long to think of an answer, and it stretches between them until it starts to burn and spark, but the last thing Jonghyun meant was that. Any of it. All the crazy things that don’t belong in Taemin’s head, fluttering just out of reach. In his stomach, too. His heart.

Way too late, he finds words. Safe ones. “I’m not doing aegyo, not over the phone.”

“In person, then,” Jonghyun presses him, so normally. As normal as he ever is. “The next time you visit I won’t forget~”

Whenever that will be. The longest Taemin has ever gone without seeing Jonghyun was three months, during his tour in Japan last summer. He was so busy he barely had time to eat or sleep, but with every waking moment he still missed him. The way things are going now, he’ll have nothing else to do but that.

He wants to see him right now. So badly.

“You really aren’t having a hard time?” Taemin says out loud.

“The idea of enlistment is worse than the reality, Taemin-ah,” Jonghyun tells him. “I’ve barely had to fire a gun since basic training, and I’ve never had this much time to think in my life.”

That’s not always a good thing with him. Jonghyun can’t live without time alone, but he only ever uses it to make himself sad, or torture himself over things he can’t change, and boredom is like poison to him. But Taemin is back to things he can’t say. “What do you have to think about?”

Or things he should know better than to ask. Taemin’s stomach twists up, but he only has to live with that for the briefest moment, and Jonghyun rescues him: “You.”

“Hyung~”

Jonghyun laughs at him, but in the next breath he’s saying, “You think I’m playing with you, but I’m not.”

Taemin knows he isn’t. Otherwise his heart wouldn’t hurt so much.

“I think I’m thinking of you, but then I just think of myself. You know how I am.”

“How did you convince yourself that telling me things is selfish of you?” Jonghyun says. “If it is I wish you’d be more selfish, I want you to tell me everything.”

“You don’t know how many of my problems are my own fault.” Such as the fact that they’re talking about it again. Jonghyun would have answered whatever else he said, found things to fill his silences, just stayed on the line and breathed with him, but Taemin circled back to this. “You always think nothing is.”

“You think everything is,” Jonghyun says, too gently to be a retort. “How are you to blame for any of this?”

He could have pushed SM harder. Compromised with them more. Just done better, somehow, some way. But the more he lies here and thinks about it, the more the specifics unravel, and after all day of this, he’s so tangled up in it he can’t figure out where it starts or ends. He has to cut through it. How much more could that hurt?

“If I’m not, that’s worse. Then there’s nothing I can do to fix it.”

A lot. A lot, a lot. He can hardly take admitting it.

“Taeminnie.”

Or the sound of his own name. Jonghyun’s voice.

It rips, “There’s nothing you can do to fix me, either, hyung,” from him, and then again, he’s falling back on, “You know me. I just feel like shit until I don’t anymore.”

Jonghyun’s sigh is as light as air, but it presses Taemin down into the mattress, warm and heavy. “What’s your boyfriend doing?”

Dongwook? He has Saturday off, so probably having dinner, or still in bed. With someone else, for all Taemin cares.

“Can we not talk about him right now?”

“Sorry.” That’s the first time Jonghyun has said it without meaning it. Taemin can almost picture the look on his face, lip caught between his teeth, eyes narrowing, fighting with himself not to say, “I just wish he loved you like he should. Then I could leave you with him while I’m not there.”

Taemin’s heart flips over and lands flat, sending tiny cracks all along it. He should be defending Dongwook or something, but he’s the one who dumped him, and Jonghyun said to stop blaming himself. And it’s not like Taemin ever loved him, either.

“I don’t like leaving you with the army, either. They’re worse than Dongwook hyung,” he says instead, right as Jonghyun starts up again:

“I don’t mean that I don’t want you to talk to me, Taeminnie. I do.” His voice dies as he catches up to Taemin’s words, and then he smiles in Taemin’s ear, this tiny helpless noise Taemin feels down to his toes. “I’m the selfish one, I was happy when I saw that you’d sent me so many texts. Even after I read them, I still was. I’m just sorry that I wasn’t there for the first one, I’m sorry I took so long. Hyung is sorry.”

“I miss you.”

Taemin has never let himself say those words out loud before. It doesn’t break him, or Jonghyun, or anything. He lands on the other side clean and whole.

“But you don’t need me,” Jonghyun tells him. He’s wrong. Should Taemin tell him that? Or should he be good and lie still and listen to the rest of it. Fill himself with Jonghyun’s voice, soft and low and gentle. “I know how strong you are. You’ll get through this. I don’t just mean the leak, but everything.” Jonghyun clears his throat. “Your days feel empty right now, right? Fill them with things you like, the guiltier your pleasure the better. Food you wouldn’t let yourself eat, albums you never had time to listen to, movies no one with taste likes…messages to hyung you’d be too embarrassed to send…toys to play with yourself since Dongwook-ssi is so useless.”

Taemin’s whole body goes hot, then hotter at the sound of his own voice rising into this whine, “Hyung~”

Taemin rolls over and hides in his pillow as Jonghyun laughs at him again. He did this to himself by lying. Somehow Jonghyun has always taken Taemin’s breakups harder than Taemin himself, and Taemin forgets his boyfriends long before he does. If he knew, he’d bite his tongue off sooner than remind him, but if Taemin told him now, it’d hurt him more to have said Dongwook’s name than it does Taemin to hear it.

It barely hurts at all.

“Time will pass,” Jonghyun says. “Even if SM doesn’t give you work, I know you’ll make some for yourself, but you’re so much more than that.”

 _How can you tell me I don’t need you and then tell me all that?_ Jonghyun has always spoiled Taemin so much he's never had to spoil himself.

“Hurry up and get out,” Taemin demands.

“August isn’t that long from now.”

They’re not even halfway through March, and SM will finish planning April soon. And then in April, May. June. July. An eternity.

“The Department of Defense comes before me?”

Another thing Taemin shouldn’t have said. His ears go back to glowing, but it’s not like Jonghyun will know. How could he?

“You made that cute face, right?” He always does, _always._ Taemin is never safe. “Even cuter than how you sound. That’s not fair when hyung can’t see.”

Taemin wishes he could. He can hear Jonghyun’s smile, and if he closes his eyes, he can picture it exactly, big and crinkly-eyed and stupid. And cute. So cute he could die. Maybe part of him does, when he opens his eyes and rolls over to stare at the ceiling again.

“You’re the one who never wanted to video call, you said I sounded too far away,” Taemin says. And then, without meaning a word, “You have to hang up soon, I don’t want to take up your whole night.”

“I want you to,” Jonghyun says immediately. “You will anyway.”

He should think of himself for once instead, but that’s the last thing he’d ever want to hear. Taemin tells him things he would. Stupid things, random things, things that aren’t funny, things he says without thinking, and things from so deep inside himself he’d rather die than show anyone but Jonghyun. Jonghyun argues with him just to argue, makes fun of him just to make fun of him, agrees when he shouldn’t, laughs when no one else would, listens just because it’s him.

He waits until nine fifty-five to say, “Good night, Taemin-ah.”

They have five minutes left. Then Jonghyun has until morning to lie awake listening to his unit snore, while Taemin lies here listening to the silence. The stars will fade and the sun will rise, and Taemin will get up to his alarm and shower and brush his teeth and go in to work, while Jonghyun does…army stuff. The other hyungs never stop talking about it, but Taemin can never get him to start.

“Night, hyung.” Taemin has to force the words out, but then, “Hyung,” escapes with them.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Everything.

“You love me,” Jonghyun says.

Taemin feels those words with his whole body, breath catching in his throat, heart exploding, skin tingling, warm all over. “Mm.”

“I love you too.”

Long after he hangs up, Jonghyun stays with Taemin. Does that mean part of Taemin is there with Jonghyun too? He would give all of himself in a heartbeat, but then he’d have nothing left for the things he has to do here.

It takes so little to find Im Najung in his phone. Not much more to tap out:

_Can you meet with me tomorrow? We need to talk._

Mooyeol hyung picks Taemin up an hour early with no questions asked, at least until they’re in the van and he needs to know where to go. Taemin gives him directions to the café he and Najung agreed upon, then fills him in on the details as they speed through the empty streets. By the time they pull up to the curb, the moon and the sun are sharing the sky. This shouldn’t take long, maybe just enough for the stars to disappear, but Mooyeol hyung isn’t willing to wait in the van this time. He leaves his book and follows Taemin in, slumping into the seat next to him. Taemin buys him a coffee, but none for himself. Caffeine and no food makes him crazy, and it’s bad enough already, sitting here while his stomach eats itself and straining to hear the door chime open.

When she finally shows up fifteen minutes later, Im Najung goes without too, turning Taemin down when he offers to pay. He’s never even bought her a meal before, there was never time. She joined after XTM, just in time to start prepping for Never Gonna Dance Again, and instead of going out for drinks with the others after the show finished, they’ve ended up here. Taemin is only realizing now this is the first time he’s seen her outside the practice room. When she’s not sweaty and tired and glaring at the girl in the mirror, clocking her every misstep, she’s really pretty. Even if she’s eyeing him instead from across the table, face drawn, leg jogging, jacket still on, sitting on the edge of her seat like half of her is dying to jump up and run away. Is he that scary?

“You can relax. I didn’t call you here to yell at you.”

That gets this weird smile out of her, tight and nervous. Ironic. “You’re too nice. That’s the biggest problem you can have in this industry.”

She’s right about that, but wrong about him. He’s not Jinki. His career has always come before every single person in his life, and that included himself right up until today. He’s not here for her sake.

“I’ve survived like this since I was fourteen,” he says out loud. Back when she must have been in elementary school, he was already dragging himself through twenty-hour days. “Did SM already fire you?”

She doesn’t blink. “Were you worried you’d have to do it?”

Mooyeol hyung stirs beside Taemin. “Were you always like this? I don’t remember you ever picking fights before.”

Her eyes widen and her mouth opens as if to retort, then closes. She sinks back into her chair, unfolding her hands to tuck her hair behind her ears nervously. She always wore it up, out of her face. Taemin had no idea that it was this long.

“It keeps coming out that way, sorry. I’m not the type who knows how to say things in a way that will make people want to hear it.” She hesitates, before turning from Mooyeol hyung to Taemin. “I’m sorry, oppa. Really. That’s why I agreed to meet with you, to say that. I took it down myself before SM even found out, but it was already too late.”

That’s not what Taemin came to hear. Yesterday’s frustration slams into him, so sudden it almost knocks him breathless. “Then why—?”

“I don’t know, I was frustrated.” She combs her fingers through her hair again, knotting them in it, almost like she’s about to tear it out. “That’s a pretty shitty excuse, huh.”

“It didn’t help Taeminnie, or hurt SM. You know that, right?”

Mooyeol hyung says it before Taemin can even find words. But maybe it’s better that way. Half the things he could have said are right there on her face, and the rest are probably racing around her head, clawing up her nerves, ripping her apart inside. Taemin would know, they’re doing the same to him.

“You’ve never thought about doing anything like that?” she says, almost like she’s read his mind. “If I were you, I would have gone crazy by now.”

Does she think he hasn’t? The difference is he’d rather go through a thousand more days like yesterday, sign with SM for another thousand years just like the past one, all the delays and bullshit and frustration and the waiting, than never work again. It’s so easy to say he’d rather die than do anything to ruin the music he’s poured himself into, but it’s so much harder to live for it.

Maybe thinking like that is already crazy enough, though. It’s only a job, and Taemin is only an idol, and she had enough after half a year of this shit. She doesn’t need to hear about the twelve he’s lasted.

As gently as he can, he says, “I make a lot more money than you, Najung-ah.”

“It’s not about that for you, though,” she presses him, instead of taking the out he gave her. “I’ve worked with a lot of different groups, but you were the first one I couldn’t keep up with.”

“You kept up just fine, though?” Taemin isn’t lying to be nice, he wouldn’t, but it’s not his problem anymore if she thinks that. She doesn’t care either way, arms crossed, eyes fixed on his face, waiting for a real answer. Something like, “It was, is my dream. I’m too old for that, right?”

She smiles, of all things.

“It was my dream, too. I trained to be an idol, same as you, but this is as far as I got in the end. And I’m okay with that. If I can dance, I’m happy.”

“And if you can’t…”

Her smile twists ever-so-slightly. “Do I sound bitter?”

Taemin smiles back. Since Jonghyun taught him how again, it costs him nothing.

“It’s okay if you are. If I were you I would be. I am as it is, and I’m me.” He’s spent the last twelve years of his life building the name Taemin, and it still means something, even to her. To himself. “It took most of you forever to look me in the eye after we started working together, but these days, I’m the one who has a hard time facing all of you.” Even now, after what she did, it takes so much out of him just to keep his head up. “The questions you asked me were easy, right? They shouldn’t have been so hard to answer. Thank you for still expecting things from me.”

“I bragged to all my friends when I got this job. ‘I’m dancing for Taemin.’” She hesitates. “You probably don’t even remember, but you let me take a selca with you, and that was my proof. It makes me so crazy, thinking that picture is all I got out of this.” As soon as she catches up to her own words, her eyes flick to Mooyeol hyung, and she’s adding in a rush, “I deleted the rest of it, don’t worry. All my videos.”

Good.

“You should have let me finish before,” Taemin says. “I was going to say, I’m sorry I let you down.”

“It’s my own fault. I should have realized this company is a shithole, same as everywhere else.”

“I’m sorry the concert got cancelled, I’m sorry your hard work turned to nothing.” Part of Taemin is almost scared to say it and curse himself again, but what’s another month or two? “And I’m sorry you won’t be there when ‘Idea’ finally comes out.”

_It’ll come, Taeminnie. As surely as spring will. Time will pass._

She slumps back in her chair with something between a groan and a whine, and all of the sudden Taemin realizes how young she is. “Would it make you any happier to know that now I’m feeling really bitter? I should have held out.”

It doesn’t, and Taemin isn’t going to tell her what she should have done. It’s enough that she knows.

“I know a lot of people, and those people know a lot more,” he says. “I’ll find another place for you.”

Her face goes strange, almost like she’s fighting with herself, and she starts to say, “It’s fine, I can figure it out myself—”

“The only way I can move on is if you do, and I want to. Really.”

From blaming himself. Resenting her. Resenting himself for resenting her. All that stuff. Only time will tell if “Idea” is ruined for him, or for anyone who saw her post, but Taemin wishes it would hurry up and do it.

For now, he has to wait for her to finish struggling with herself and say the only thing that’s left: “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Her mouth presses into one long thin line, and for several moments, she’s silent. Maybe because she has nothing to say to that, or maybe because she has too much. On another day, in another world, the café would have filled around them by now, college students on their laptops, ahjummas gossiping over cappuccinos, people who brought only a book for company. Today it stays empty and silent, nowhere for either of them to hide. The street outside the café is no better, except the van is right over there, in a parking spot that would have been taken.

“Do you need a ride?” Taemin asks, ignoring the face Mooyeol hyung tries really hard not to make.

She shakes her head. “It’s okay, I want to go for a walk. Clear my head.”

“You really deleted everything?” Mooyeol hyung says before she can take another step.

“I’m dumb, but I’m not a liar,” she says flatly. Instead of taking off she lingers. “Oppa.”

“What?”

“Take care of yourself. Watch your health.”

“You, too,” Taemin says, surprised by how much he means it. Or how much he has to say again, all of the sudden. “Covid won’t last forever, Najung-ah. It’ll get worse before it gets better, but it will get better. Hold on until then, okay? No matter how bad it gets, don’t do anything else to mess up your life.”

“What about you, what are you going to do?” She shifts her weight, playing with her hair again, then goes ahead and says it. “Maybe I’m not the one who should say this, but you’re working too hard. They already pushed the release back to April, and they’ll probably push it back again. Even you can’t stay in comeback mode for months. Find something else to do, oppa. Something that won’t kill you.”

He doesn’t know how to tell her that taking one single day off practice was worse than what she’s talking about, but that has nothing to do with her anymore, anyway. Still, same as he laid awake all last night, Jonghyun’s words spinning gently around his head, he spends the ride to work turning hers over and over and over. By the time he gets to the practice room, the one thing he knows is that they were both right.

The rest will come later. When the music stops and his body stops doing what he tells it to, and he has to think some more.

There’s one noona left in the A&R Department that has been around since “Replay.” She was the only person who listened to his opinions when they were building his solo sound for Ace, and since she set him on this path, she’s been here for every step of it. It took until the hyungs enlisted for her to stop seeing him as a fifteen-year-old, and when she looks up from her desk and sees him, she doesn’t jump into a half bow like all the other staffers surrounding her. Just shakes her head and goes back to her computer screen.

“You have an entire album waiting.”

It’s not going anywhere. It hasn’t for the last year of Taemin’s life. The remains of Want’s repackage, the songs he recorded over the days and months following, all cobbled together into one album. Jonghyun has always said that music should tell a story, and that’s what Taemin always tried to do with every one of his performances. He could say more with his body than he ever could with words. Now that’s been taken from him, all he has left is sound.

Taemin drops into the seat next to her. He can’t give her puppy dog eyes if she won’t look at him, but that’s never worked on her anyway. “I want to go back in.”

She pauses in her typing to shoot him a look over her glasses. “To edit?”

That too.

“To record.”

Before the world ended, Never Gonna Dance Again was a concert and a tour. Now it will be an album. A double one or two EP’s, the songs he’s already recorded or the ones he hasn’t yet found in SM’s vaults, he doesn’t care. All that will come later, and he has nothing but empty time to fill. From now on, this album will become his life.


	3. Chapter 3

“Are you going to stay here all night?”

Taemin looks up from the monitor to find Mooyeol hyung standing in the doorway of the control room, jaw cracking on a yawn. When they picked up again with “Stranger,” he told Taemin he’d be on the couch in the entryway if he needed him, and he probably made it another five pages into his book before he covered his face with it and slept. And that was after lunch…or dinner? The last time they ate. Mooyeol hyung’s face says that was millions and millions of years ago, eyes darting between Taemin and the engineers.

“Why, do you have a date or something?” Taemin is being mean, but Mooyeol hyung laughs, same as always. He went to the best university in Korea and comes from a good family, so inertia alone should have been enough to land him in a relationship, but he’s been solo since birth. Which is probably why he’s stuck here, putting up with Taemin. “Just go home, hyung. It’s okay, I can get a taxi.”

Mooyeol hyung rubs his hand over his face, shaking his head. “Wake me up when you’re done.”

He’s halfway out the door when Taemin asks.

“How late is it?”

“Nine thirty.”

“Already?”

Taemin’s heart flips over, and his hand is already digging into his pants pocket when Mooyeol hyung catches up.

“Are you looking for your phone? You gave it to me, remember, you said it was a distraction.” He smiles wearily. “If I were going to lie to you, I would have said something way later, Taemin-ah.”

Taemin is the liar, letting him think that. He’s on his feet before he knows it, chair rolling back across the floor as he scrabbles for his things. Which is nothing basically. Hoodie, notepad, phone…phone? Phone. That’s right, Mooyeol hyung has it, he literally just said. He beat Kyuhyun’s manager to the parking spot right outside the doors for once, and in this traffic Taemin’s house is ten, fifteen minutes away.

They only have thirty.

“Let’s pick up here tomorrow,” Taemin should have started with. The engineers are still gaping up at him.

“You’re letting us go? So easily?”

“Don’t question it,” Mooyeol hyung warns them.

“We’ve reached a point where we need to sleep on it,” Taemin says. It’s not even bullshit, it’s the wall he’s been banging his head against for the past hour while refusing to admit it. “There’s something missing with the arrangement, I need to figure out what.”

“Are you sure that’s the problem?” The whole reason Taemin wanted to work with this guy is because he would say things like that and not _We were supposed to go home four hours ago,_ but not tonight. Please. “When you’re layering sounds, there’s always a sweet spot. We could be off balance on the other side, it could be too much.”

When the A&R team first showed Taemin “Stranger,” the demo’s brief described it as minimalist, along with a whole lot of other things he glossed over. He skipped ahead to the next song without thinking twice, but it lingered in the back of his mind, and before the day was over, he had circled back around to it. Whatever it was that had drawn him to it then, he’s trying to bring out now. The feeling of foggy weather, when each step you take feels like it’s into nothing and you can no longer tell someone apart from their shadow, and you’re left chasing silhouettes.

“I’m not talking about anything drastic,” Taemin says. “Just something for effect, to make it fresh. Like footsteps or something.”

“In place of drumbeats?” The engineer’s eyes are lighting up. “It wouldn’t take long to—”

“Tomorrow, hyung,” comes lurching out of Taemin. He claps him on the shoulder with one last, “Good work today,” and doesn’t breathe again until they hit the exit and the night bursts in on him and Mooyeol hyung. When they pulled in this morning the sun was already blazing hot, and the van spent all day baking under it. A wall of hot air hits Taemin as he yanks his door open and settles inside, and as soon as Mooyeol jams the key in the ignition he’s already fumbling for the AC, leaving Taemin to watch him impatiently.

“Phone, hyung.”

Mooyeol hyung hands it to him. One more heartbeat, another skipped, and then Taemin has Jonghyun’s name at his fingertips.

Three new messages.

“Home or the practice room?” Mooyeol hyung says.

Taemin double, triple checks to make sure, _jonghyunnie hyung jonghyunnie hyung jonghyunnie hyung,_ then stuffs his phone into his pocket. It burns into his thigh, even as he props his feet up on the dash and slumps against his window. “Home.”

Mooyeol hyung should be happy, but he just nods and goes straight past the main building, flicking the radio on and settling in. Taemin’s place is only a few miles further, but the city crawls by, buildings peering down at him, neon signs flashing slogans he knows by heart after ten years, cars rolling past in the other lane. Even in this traffic, they hit every light on the way, and for every yellow that has Mooyeol hyung coasting to a stop, Taemin has to bite his tongue not to tell him to step on it, he can make it. He never can.

“When am I meeting with Koharu noona?” Taemin asks him finally.

“Is that something I have to remember?” Mooyeol hyung says.

What he doesn’t is, _Am I managing your computer time now too~?_ The first time Taemin met with Koharu over video call was on the practice room floor, dripping in sweat from twelve hours with Kasper’s choreography, trying to find his least bad angle. She told him to send her a clip of what they had and wait until he got home and showered next time. This will be the time after that, whenever it’s supposed to be.

“No, but you do anyway,” Taemin says, ninety-five percent sure he’s right. “That’s how big your brain is.”

“My heart, you mean,” Mooyeol hyung corrects him with a laugh. “Thursday night.”

That’s…the day after tomorrow? Or the day after that?

“I sent her an updated video based on her suggestions, I’m just waiting to hear back.”

Same as with “Stranger,” “Criminal” is missing something. What, Taemin doesn’t know. All he can hope right now is that Koharu will.

“Taemin-ah.”

“I’m racking up another bill for SM,” Taemin finishes for him, only this time he’s ninety-five percent sure he’s wrong. He leans back further in his seat, feeling the weight of his phone shift subtly in his pocket, so light it feels like it’s not there, so heavy he can barely breathe. “If ‘Idea’ cost them a house, ‘Criminal’ will cost them a building in Gangnam by the time I’m done.”

Mooyeol hyung is no fun. All he has to say to any of that is, “If they weren’t willing to pay, they would have stopped you.”

Which leaves Taemin to guess again. For real.

“It’s already July.” And that’s what he got out of Creative at the beginning of last month. Finally. Coming out of that meeting they gave him the first week of it, and now he’s fallen back to the third or fourth, but the specific date was supposed to stop mattering to him when they announced it publicly. Anyway. “That’s what you meant, right?”

“Mm.”

“You don’t get why I keep changing shit at the last minute.”

Mooyeol hyung shakes his head helplessly. “Because you’re you.”

Taemin sweeps his hair out of his face, knotting his fingers in it. It’s long enough now that his bangs hang into his eyes, or as Jonghyun replied to his latest selca, _You can tuck it behind your ear again, right? It’s so pretty like that~._ At the barest tingle of heat across his skin, Taemin clears his throat and sits up straight, feet falling to the floor with a thud. It’s been a long five months.

When Taemin told Director-nim he wanted to go back in to re-record parts of his album back in March, Creative booked him studio time without a second thought, and by the time they and the A&R team remembered how to communicate, he was already into his third new song. Since then, Taemin’s album has grown to twice its size and split into two: old and new, light and dark, good and bad, happy and sad, heaven and hell, Act 1 and Act 2, or as Mooyeol hyung put it, _Are you okay? It’s okay if you don’t want to answer, Taemin-ah, but don’t laugh. I know better than anyone what you’ve been through all these years, but it’s never gotten to you like this._

“We should have the masters ready by next week, and then we can finalize the track list for Act 1. Last time we talked they hadn’t even been in touch with the factory.” Or the PD for “Criminal’s” MV, or PDs for the photobook and jacket shooting, or. None of this is new information when Mooyeol hyung knows it all better than him. Taemin doesn’t need to bother telling him, either, that SM has to get through EXO-SC and Seulgi and Joohyun before Taemin exists again. He swallows back the bitter taste in his mouth as the light turns green and his world starts again. “The point was choreography is the least of our worries. Music shows probably won’t even look at it before they approve it. I’m me, like you said~”

Mooyeol hyung nods. Frowns. “What about filming?”

Why is he bringing that up now, of all things?

“We agreed not to at night. Bad lighting.”

“Not Taemlog,” Mooyeol hyung says patiently. “For Mtopia.”

Oh. That. The only time anyone at SM is willing to meet with him these days, it’s been as SuperM’s Taemin. They sat them down for the first time after their Beyond Live to pitch the idea: variety show. YouTube. Games, competitions, sports, whatever travel Covid restrictions would allow. The production schedule has changed so many times since then that Taemin stopped keeping track, spreading out over weeks as cases dropped, then shrinking into as few days as humanly possible as they rose again. And now all of the sudden it’s risen up in front of him like a wall, blocking his path. The forty-eight straight hours he’ll spend in front of the cameras this week are two days he can’t afford to lose, but he’ll go without sleeping all month if he has to. If that’s what it takes to come back by the end of it.

Mooyeol hyung’s look says it all: _You’re hanging on by your fingernails, Taemin-ah. It’d hurt less to let go at this point._

Out loud, he tries, “It’s not the end of the world if you get pushed back to August. Either way, you'll end up with two promotion cycles.”

Only because the world already ended back in February. And Taemin can't even think about Act 2, not right now. Not in the least because SM won't talk about it.

“Don’t even say that.” Taemin forces himself into making a face at him. Making it into a joke. “I can always replace you with Donghyeop hyung.”

Shinee’s manager. Mooyeol hyung just laughs.

“Jinki is coming back, someone has to take care of him.”

Taemin’s heart would have leapt, if Mooyeol hyung hadn’t just poured grave dirt down on it. As it is, it flips over feebly. “It’s official, they’re letting him out early?”

“Not early, he’s going on leave until his discharge on the twentieth.” Because of Covid protocols, Taemin knows that much. The way Jinki explained it to him the last time they talked, _hyung went in early so I got to leave early~._ Taemin won’t be so lucky. Even if Mooyeol hyung knew what was in his head, he’d still be smiling his same smile. “You’re always on your phone, don’t you ever talk to him?”

Taemin’s face goes hot all on its own. If he really always were, he wouldn’t have given it to Mooyeol hyung today, or forgotten about it until it was almost too late. Fifteen minutes left.

“Jinki hyung never has his phone,” Taemin says. “He probably doesn’t even want to leave base, he loves the army so much. That’s all he talks about.”

“You’ll understand when you go in.” He catches the look that puts on Taemin’s face in under a second. “I can’t say that either, huh.”

“Not until I come back. And then Shinee has to. And then…there won’t be anything to say.”

This year has felt like a hundred, but for how much time seems to have passed, so little of his life has. He’ll find out soon if he’s still in the exact same place as he was in February – if SM just put him on a multimillion won treadmill and left him to run until his heart gives out, and if his album will still be in pieces, only this time with more of them than can fit together. And then there’s the next if, the one Mooyeol hyung would shake his head at and say, _If the first half of this year has been a hundred years, you have a hundred more to go,_ but Taemin doesn’t want to hear it. And if he really still is in this place next summer, when his number could be up, Mooyeol hyung probably wouldn’t want to hear that Taemin told him so.

But in the meantime, every day is the same – wake up, record, practice, try to sleep, SM, his apartment, SM, his apartment, SM, and somewhere in the middle of all that is his phone. Jonghyun.

Taemin’s heart is squeezing in on itself like it’s trying to turn inside out.

Three messages.

It’s nine fifty when the door to Taemin’s place slams behind him and he’s alone with his phone.

_i miss the scent of shampoo_

_the stuff they give us doesnt smell like anything_

_are you still using the same brand?_

That’s it?

Taemin stumbles out of his shoes and dives onto his couch, not taking his eyes off the screen for one second, staring into it like he’s trying to unscramble the meaning. Which he’s not. There isn’t one. _since when,_ he taps out. And waits. Nine minutes. Eight. Seven. With each second that passes, Taemin’s heart speeds into a blur, like it’s about to take off. The rest of him sinks into the cushions, as he lies here and breathes and stares at the ceiling instead of the screen, hidden in his fist. If it goes off, if Jonghyun replies, he’ll know. He’ll feel it.

Or not.

Ten o’clock.

He feels that too. When he gets up his body seems to weigh more than before. Maybe it really does? He was at fifty-nine kilos before eating breakfast this morning, and he skipped practice to come back here, so all the things he wasn’t supposed to eat today have stayed with him. He could have slid back to sixty. Shit. Jonghyun would tell him he’s too skinny, and if he knew Taemin was even considering fasting he’d call it starving himself. If he were here he’d ambush him at the studio at the end of every day, carrying him off to cheat on his diet at the nearest barbecue place. Or jokbal. Or just soju. He knows all Taemin’s weaknesses from years and years of feeding him. But he’s not here, so when Taemin sucks in his stomach in front of the mirror, there’s no one to poke and tickle him into breathing, or to pinch his cheeks. It hurts more when Taemin does it to himself. Not much, but still. Jonghyun always told Taemin they were like dumplings, cute enough to eat, but that’s stupid. He is.

Which shampoo was he even talking about? Taemin can’t even remember when he last changed, or how many times it’s been. The one in his shower right now smells like…citrus? That’s what the label says, so that’s what he tells Jonghyun when he finds his phone again and brings it to bed with him.

He always wants to know the most random stuff. Taemin is the stupid one for answering, but he always does. Yesterday he asked if Taemin had eaten watermelon yet, since it’s summer, and Taemin went out and bought some pre-sliced to report back with a selca. All Jonghyun had to say after that is, _your lips look red, are you sure its not an allergy,_ like Taemin hasn’t been eating it in front of him since the summer they first met, when his mom used to cut one open for them and Taemin’s brother to enjoy. Whenever it rains there he asks if it was sunny in Seoul, and on the rare nights Taemin can see the stars, no clouds or pollution, Jonghyun expects him to know the names of constellations that he’s learned out of boredom. If he reads something about Taemin on the Internet he wants to know if it’s true, even – especially – when he knows it’s not, and he makes stuff up too, Taemin is ninety percent sure. He’s denied at least ten different dating rumors, ranging from girl group members to that one hyung from their neighborhood Jonghyun is convinced that Taemin had a crush on. Which he did not. And if Taemin replies too much, he’ll say things like, _dont you ever go on dates._ And then in the five seconds it takes him to remember how much the world he knew has changed, _or at least have date nights. idk if i should be telling you to pay more attention to your boyfriend or if he doesnt deserve to be called that,_ followed in two seconds flat by, _thats a lie i know its the second thing._ And then, into Taemin’s silence, _sometimes i wonder if you reply to me while hes next to you. is he really never there?_ And after thirty minutes of it, _you dont have to tell hyung about him, taeminnie. but you know you can._

Taemin’s heart thuds in his chest and he scrolls wildly past the rest, Jonghyun’s blurry selcas, the split-second snippets of “Criminal” Taemin has sent, out of context emojis, single word replies and paragraph-long messages, good nights, his album and the army, rumors and jokes, Taemin’s life, Taemin’s work, Taemin’s non-existent boyfriend he should have told Jonghyun he broke up with months and months ago, Taemin’s—

_you never even said what it was_

Tattoo.

_you said it wasnt weird but you want hyung to imagine weird things_

_you can see it when you get out_

_its a promise_

Taemin just meant when Shinee came back and they went back to sharing a dressing room, what promise? Jonghyun is so weird.

Taemin is weirder. Why else would his stomach be flipping over, why is this stupid flush creeping under his skin, why can’t he breathe all of the sudden. He laid under the needle for hours with his pants around his thighs and a complete stranger’s eyes drilling into him, what are Jonghyun’s compared to that?

Almost before he can catch up, Taemin is lurching over to snap the lamp on, tugging his shirt up, easing his pants down, aiming his phone at himself. It would be so much easier to get a clean shot if he was smart and got up to stand in front of the mirror again, instead of lying here twisting this way and that, craning to check the angle, trying to show everything and nothing at the same time. Just his tattoo, not him. His tattoo and the part of him it’s on.

Him.

…There. Send.

Wait, what? No.

Too late. Too late too late too late. Fuuuuck, what was he thinking? Taemin is so stupid, this is so embarrassing, he just sent Jonghyun a nude—semi-nude. Not even that, it doesn’t even count, and he’s wearing clothes anyway.

And it’s only eleven tonight. Jonghyun won’t get his phone until five tomorrow. He won’t see it until then. Taemin has that long to live. Or to die. He curls in on himself, screwing his eyes shut tight and counting his breaths. His whole body tightens up around each one he takes, dizzy and too-hot, strange ache building up so deep inside him.

His phone buzzes.

What, how—?

_I miss you._

What? Everything seems to slow down and speed up, Taemin’s heart and his breath and his eyes, blurring over those three words over and over and over, until finally he looks past them to the number, and it all slams to a stop. Unknown. Who…?

Dongwook, probably. There’s no one else it could be. Even if that leads to a lot of other questions like why, when he’s the one who broke up with Taemin. Or why right now, why did he always have to have such shitty timing? Why can’t he learn to jerk off instead of texting his most recent ex late at night, why would he think Taemin is desperate enough to put out, and why couldn’t he have just said he was down to fuck instead of telling Taemin cheesy lies that make his skin crawl. Why didn’t anyone take his phone away from him after dark, why isn’t he in the military, why did he have to brag so much to Taemin about how he served in radio communications since he was too smart for grunt work, why did Taemin ever even date a guy like that in the first place. Why wasn’t it Jonghyun. Why did Taemin send that. Why does he even want a reply. Why isn’t he fighting crazy with crazy, sending a million more messages and burying it so far down even Jonghyun will get tired of scrolling through Taemin before he reaches it. Why, _how_ is he still breathing.

Taemin deletes Dongwook’s message, slapping his phone down onto his bedside table and pushing it with the tips of his fingers, until he sends it skittering out of reach. Then he gets the light and scoots to the other side of his bed.

And tries to sleep.

Tries to breathe.

Somehow he fell asleep, because he wakes up to his alarm the next morning. He shoves his phone into his pocket without thinking, and then has the entire ride to work to regret it. Jonghyun won’t even see it until five tonight and it’s barely five a.m. now, but it burns a hole in the back of his brain, and somehow every single thought he has gets sucked into it. What if he says it’s ugly. What if he plays dumb about the tattoo and asks Taemin why he sent him a photo of his body. What if he doesn’t say anything at all, what if when Taemin’s phone goes off finally and he works up to checking it, all he says is, _we had a thunderstorm this afternoon. its so much louder w the mountains._ Or something like that. One of those things that only has one meaning instead of ten thousand different ones Taemin is left trying to figure out, and it doesn’t mean anything to him.

“Are you feeling okay?” Mooyeol hyung says. When Taemin glances up at him, his eyes shift back to the road.

“I don’t have Covid.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Taemin knows that, which is why his heart is beating so hard all of the sudden. Is he really being that weird, can people just look at him and tell?

“I’m fine, hyung.” _I sent Jonghyunnie hyung a photo of my tattoo. That’s all. There's nothing wrong with it so there's nothing wrong with me._ “Just tired.”

He’s the one who decided it was a good idea to get up at this time every morning to cram a practice session in before recording, and it’s his fault he spent all night tossing and turning with his heart racing and skin tingling. Even now, it’s the same. What is wrong with him? Why did he send that, why, why, why. Taemin’s head thunks against his window.

“Is there a way to delete a text?” he says, looking anywhere but Mooyeol hyung. “Not just on my end. So that the other person can’t see it anymore, either.”

Mooyeol hyung has a degree from Seoul University, but all he has for Taemin is, “Once it’s sent, it’s sent.” He shoots Taemin another glance that he catches in the corner of his eye. “Is it Dongwook-ssi?”

“Why would I have anything to say to him?”

Taemin swings around to give him a look of his own. Mooyeol hyung just smiles, same as always.

“Is there someone else?”

“What?”

Taemin’s heart slams to a stop as they hit yet another red light, but as they sit there it picks right back up, twice as fast.

“Never mind.”

“You’re with me 24/7, hyung. If there were, you would know,” Taemin tells him, and goes back to his window.

Instead of nodding along, Mooyeol hyung’s eyes skim over his face again. “No jokes about me having no sense for these things?”

“It stops being funny around comebacks,” Taemin says, so fast his words all blur together, and then, when Mooyeol hyung so much as blinks, “Just watch the road.”

Taemin doesn’t go back to breathing again until he and the dancers have started their stretches, and he has to control it. Somehow. His body is doing all these things he never told it to, head light, stomach fluttering, skin flushing so hot in the cool air. He’s going to start sweating before they even do anything, at this rate. Should he just smash his phone? Drop it in the toilet in the bathroom down the hall, climb all the way up to the roof just to throw it off, let it die and never revive it.

It’s eighty-five percent charged. No way it’ll die before five, unless he sits here and drains it himself, instead of all the things he came here to do. Such as work on the song that he’s pinned his entire life on. The first day he went back to the A&R team to find a new song to put “Idea” on the backburner, it was “Criminal” that found him. When the staff told him it had been there for years he couldn’t believe it. Was it possible he had listened to it before without realizing it was meant for him?

Now he has to mold himself until he’s meant for it, too.

Which means he has to focus.

_Don’t reply, hyung. Don’t check your phone today, don’t even think about whether I replied to you or what I said. Don't look._

_I have shit I have to do, so please._

FOCUS.

Taemin closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. When he lets it out and opens them, it’s to the exact same world he left behind, down to his heart burning in his chest. Fuck. He stuffs his phone in his locker with his clothes and takes his place in time for the music to start.

He makes so many mistakes, the first run. Off beat, forgets the steps, so dizzy from spinning he has to right his balance, messes up the hand movements he spent all week finessing, catches his own eye in the mirror and trips over his feet. The second…better. Third fourth fifth sixth. He’s back in his body. Finally. He lives and dies with each note, each beat. He squats down while the dancers form a ring around him, then pops up for his part, sharp, clean, precise. Good. As they surround him he enters easy mode, letting himself be thrown over one of the hyungs' back, then baring his throat for the girl who replaced Najung to strangle him. She would have been made for that part. When they cover his face with their hands, his world goes dark for a split second, before the lights blind him. The killing part. Destroy me more. Sexy face. One of the dancers behind him still has the breath to laugh. Taemin doesn’t. Not for anything. Spin, forward, spin again, jump—

Crack.

He hears it before he feels it. Shooting up his arm, his spine, everywhere, every tiny part of him, whiting out from it. When he can see again the ceiling is spinning instead of him somehow, and every time he blinks there are more lights than before, burning into him. There are faces, too. Voices. Should they call an ambulance? What happened, what broke? Taeminnie, can you hear me? Taemin-ah. Did he hit his head when he fell? Someone call somebody.

“Hyung doesn’t have his phone until five,” Taemin has to tell them.

I’m pretty sure it’s just your wrist, Taeminnie, not your arm. Don’t move, don’t look. We’re getting help.

Just his wrist what? Taemin lifts it up to see. And his whole body turns inside out with pain. More white, burning through nerve endings he didn’t know he had.

You broke it.

_Your recovery will take weeks. Focus on getting well. Let’s talk again at the end of July._

The practice room ceiling seems so much lower than it did hours before, and the longer Taemin lies here and stares up at it, the more it closes in. It’s not spinning anymore, not even with the painkillers settling into his bones. Including the one that broke. Fractured. Same thing, except not at all. The doctor told him it could have been worse, but Taemin doesn’t see how at this point.

_Shouldn’t we be planning for the best case scenario, not the worst?_

_On the contrary, this works better for us. We were looking at one hell of a time crunch, and with so many things still up in the air…who’s to say how they would have landed. Now you don’t have to rush things, and the company has more time to sort out the logistics. The only thing I’m sorry about is that it happened this way._

Taemin is sorry, too.

So fucking sorry. He knew better than to fuck up like this, he knew he’d only have to breathe wrong to send it all crashing back down, the same way he fell today.

It hurts. Everywhere.

He made that call from the hospital parking lot, and Director-nim told him he could go straight home, that they would send the dancers home and cancel everything for the rest of the day. Taemin came back down here to get his things, that’s what he told Mooyeol hyung, but the only things he left behind could take him months to get back. If he ever does. “Criminal” is still in the sound system, and at the touch of a button it’d pound through this room, but that might be as far as it ever gets, same as “Idea” and “2 Kids” and all the other songs he’s spent the last four months recording, and the ones he’s spent the last year and a half sitting on. The whole basement is soundproofed. The people upstairs only hear what they want to.

Which isn’t Taemin’s voice. Any of the things he says with it. In all these months he’s tried so many different things, in their language and his own, reason and anger, petty rebellions, lies they saw straight through, truths they ignored, points and counterpoints, but maybe he should have started and ended with begging. _Don’t take the last year I have from me. Give me my career back. No, my life._

It’s all the same thing. And SM didn’t take anything from him, not this time.

“Taemin-ah.”

It’s a voice from a dream, but Taemin only has to blink, and Jinki is standing over him.

“Hyung.”

He looks the exact same as the last time Taemin saw him, when they went out to eat together with Minho in…January? His hair is maybe a little longer, but his smile is just as bright as when they hugged goodbye and he told Taemin, _Thank you for buying hyung food, I’ll pay you back when I get out,_ like he hadn’t spent the previous ten years of his life giving Taemin everything he asked for. When Minho pointed out that if he wanted to calculate things, Taemin was still deep, deep, deep in his debt, he just laughed. If he were CEO of SM, Taemin would probably have had ten comebacks between now and last spring. His MV’s would get shot on time and post-production would take weeks instead of months, and Jinki would put everything else on hold to answer Taemin’s calls and texts. Taemin would go into work every day knowing that it meant something. And even with all that, today probably still would have happened.

Taemin pushes himself upright, pain lancing up his arm at the slightest pressure on his wrist. _Fuck._ As his vision swims, Jinki sinks to his knees next to him, hovering over him like he’s not sure what to do, how to make it better. Taemin reaches up to smooth over the crease in his brow, but as soon as he lets his hand drop, it’s back.

“When did you get out?” Taemin manages.

Jinki opens his mouth and closes it, a thousand other things probably jumbling up in his head, all about Taemin and not himself, are you okay, does it hurt, is there anything hyung can do. All things he knows Taemin won’t want to hear. Finally he replies, “This morning.”

Taemin can do this, he knows this part. Now comes the accusation: “You didn’t even text me.”

“I figured you were busy.” He smiles faintly. “And hyung had other people to see~”

More important than Taemin, he means. Like he would fall for that. “Your parents.”

“Mm.”

Jinki’s smile fades, while his worry lines deepen. Taemin should tell him to be careful, if he does it long enough he’ll end up with wrinkles, and he’s old enough he should be worrying about that instead. And that it’s his first day of freedom and he should be happy.

“Don’t say you’re sorry you weren’t there,” Taemin says. “Don’t. I would have kicked you out right away if you came, anyway.”

Jinki makes a face at him. That’s better, that’s normal. At least until he reaches up to pat Taemin’s head, hand so warm and heavy and soft that suddenly Taemin is the one left with a lump rising up in his throat.

“What are you doing back here? I heard they sent you home.”

“I was so close, hyung,” Taemin gets out. To coming back. To bringing all these days and months of work, of not eating and sleeping, trying to smile, all that, out into the light. “You don’t know what this year has been like for me. The worst thing is that it was my fault this time. I fucked things up for myself.”

“You got hurt, Taeminnie, that’s not fucking up,” Jinki says, so gently it all hurts even more. “And it’s not something you could have helped, either. If there’s one thing I learned in the army, it’s that nothing happens for a reason. It just happens.”

That doesn’t help. Probably because nothing can right now.

“That’s how you like it,” Taemin says, so careful of all the cracks forming in his heart, as tiny and painful as the ones in his wrist. Each word could send him falling straight through, and Jinki would end up drowning in his feelings too, trying to pull him back out. He pokes Jinki’s side with his good hand. “You said you got fat, but it doesn’t look like it to me. You’re going to have to keep your abs for a long time, hyung, sorry. When I come back, then Shinee can.”

Like he’d ever show them off, anyway. Jinki smiles again, brighter than before. “We already have to wait for the others, did you forget?”

“I’m saying I could take longer than that. I’ll probably come back in July 2021 at this rate.”

That look is back on Jinki’s face. Taemin tries pouting, and when that doesn’t get it off, laughing. It splinters up his throat, so fake and awful sounding he could die.

“Taeminnie.”

“I picked the wrong hyung to complain to.”

Minho would have repeated all the advice his doctor gave, while Kibum swore at him for not being careful in one breath, then checked if he’d taken his meds in the next. Jonghyun… _You’re more important than your career. Why is the first thought in your head your comeback? Why is it never yourself?_ When he knows better than anyone that’s all the same thing. But his phone is down in the car with Mooyeol hyung and Jonghyun is probably doing drills right now, and Jinki is still looking at him like he’s trying to figure out how to put him back together.

_My bone didn’t break all the way through, hyung, I'm still in one piece. I’ll be fine._

Except Jinki opens his mouth, and right away, “Don’t say anything nice, I don’t want to hear it,” comes flying out of Taemin’s.

For one long moment, Jinki doesn’t say anything. Then, when Taemin is this close to getting up and walking until he hits sunlight, “It’s been a long year for you.” He takes a deep breath, and smiles again, brighter than before. “I’m sorry we left you alone, Taemin-ah. And I’m sorry things have happened the way they did. The more you don’t want to hear it, the more I want to say it~. That makes you hate hyung, right?”

“Mm.”

Jinki laughs, just like he’s supposed to.

“You did so well holding our name up on your own,” he says. “I wanted to say that too.”

“You picked the wrong day to puff me up, hyung.” Taemin’s throat is closing on him again. It would have been better if it did all the way, before he got out, “I can’t even hold my own name up, how could I hold up Shinee’s?”

“Aigoo.” Jinki pats his head again. “How long is the doctor saying it’ll take?”

Finally, something easy. At least it should be, it shouldn’t be so hard to say, “Weeks, probably. Could be months. He says he’ll know better how I’m doing after it starts to heal.”

Jinki nods. Hesitates. “Does it hurt?”

That’s even easier. Even harder. “Not much. Painkillers.”

Jinki nods again, eyes lingering on Taemin’s face, probably searching for tells. “Must be strong.”

“He wanted to give me stronger ones, but that’d make me useless,” Taemin says. “Stop making that face, hyung. Practice is the only thing I can’t do. Everything else…”

 _Focus on getting well,_ is what Director-nim said. What he meant was, _Forget about Never Gonna Dance Again for now._ No more meetings until the end of the month, except for the ones about Super One. Studio time filled by one-day recordings, OST’s and digital singles and commercial jingles. Taemlog, on hiatus. The whole reason Taemin started filming it was to increase his exposure for his comeback, and SM cutting it off is their way of saying it’s not happening. Meanwhile, Mtopia is still on. Because it’s too late to cancel or push back after all the scheduling changes and bullshit SM has gone through with the production house, and him pulling out would affect three other groups on top of SuperM, and Capitol Records is breathing down their neck, and. And SuperM makes them more money than Taemin can.

When they told him July, he should have remembered they said March. And before that, last fall. Last summer. Even if he hadn’t gotten injured…

But he did. This is his life.

“If I tell you to give it time, hyung won’t get out of here alive, right?” Jinki says.

Taemin cracks a smile. It hurts as much as everything else. “I’m scarier than the north.”

“And I can’t say I’m sorry, not again. Or that I’m proud of you.”

“As long as you don’t try to get me to talk. I’ve already said so many things I wouldn’t have to anyone else, you know that, right?”

As soon as Taemin moves to stand, Jinki is scrambling up to help him. Instead of letting Taemin walk away, lose eye contact, he squeezes his shoulder.

“There was one more thing, Taemin-ah,” he says. “You don’t have to do everything alone. I’m saying this after leaving you to do just that, but still. I wish you’d blame yourself less. And that you’d lean on other people more.”

Taemin has been every single night for the past five months, from five to ten. He has to survive on his own until then, and he went and ruined everything last night. Maybe. Fuck.

“Buy me food,” Taemin says to Jinki.

Jinki beams. “What do you want to eat?”

Whatever. He doesn’t have his diet to worry about anymore.

“You pick.”

“I don’t even know what’s good these days,” Jinki presses him.

Not just because of Covid, either. He’s been gone for a year and a half. Places have closed and open, trends have come and gone, while he’s stayed the same, living off frozen food in the army.

“That’s why you have me.” Taemin leads him to the door and out into the hallway, that first step towards the light. “Let’s go.”

The next few days crawl by. Sure as the sun rises and sets, his pain ebbs and flows with his meds. There’s nothing on television and he’s seen all the movies Minho suggests, and after spending all his days in the practice room and studio, his apartment is too quiet. On the second day, the head engineer sends him the latest version of “Stranger,” with footsteps like Taemin said. Now that all Taemin wants is an excuse to go back in, the song is everything it should be. He okays it. Koharu pushes back their call when she hears, telling him to rest up for what she’s got coming. Jinki asks Taemin for recommendations on takeout every day, probably checking to see if Taemin is lonely and wants to eat together, but he never pushes when Taemin sends him links to menus instead of asking him over. Not like Taemin’s mom. She calls him sixty-five times from morning until night, asking what he wants to eat, reminding him to wear his cast, asking if he wants to come home for now, making him say no over and over and over again.

Jonghyun doesn’t make him say anything at all. For days. Each and every one of them, from five p.m. until ten, one long slow heart attack that lasts so deep into the night Taemin is lucky if he sleeps at all.

Silence.

Taemin would rather die than break it himself.

It’s almost a relief when D-day for Mtopia arrives, except not at all. Taemin only slept because he told himself he still had to the drive between him and filming, but Mooyeol hyung gives Taemin up to the cameras outside SM’s doors. The production team came up with games and challenges for them to do on the road to the destination. More content crammed into the same amount of time. Which makes sense. Which is why Taemin gets into the van without questioning it.

Filming is…filming. Normally the problem is his brain and his heart, one freezing and the other hammering so hard it feels like his bones will break, but now that he went and broke one for real, the pain dulls everything else. It’s not as bad as it was the first few days, but every movement he makes is another reminder, stabbing up his arm, and the times he keeps still are even worse. The things he doesn’t get to do. He sits out everything that looks fun and participates in everything that doesn’t, smiles at things that would be funny if he were in the mood, laughs his ass off at things that editing will make funnier, talks to anyone who talks to him, assures the members whenever they check to see if he’s okay, which is every time PD-nim yells cut, and falls deeper and deeper into the silence Jonghyun left him in.

His phone is with him the whole time. From the van to the restaurant to the water park to the fireside, and finally to his camper. It feels like eternities stacked on top of each other, but somehow it’s only nine when filming wraps up and Taemin can retreat inside it. He says the quickest good night he can to the camera installed in the ceiling, but once he shuts it off, maybe his body will too. His face almost hurts as much as wrist from smiling so much, and when he catches his own eye in the mirror as he washes up, it feels like seeing a stranger. Even before he slathers himself in skin cream, like a ghost in the eerie blue light of his lamp. Back at the dorm, Kibum always used to tell Taemin, _What’s the use in being flattered when you’re alone? Once you’ve seen yourself in the worst light, you have nowhere to go but up for the rest of the day._ Back when going out for anything besides work was even a thing. Maybe it’s better that Kibum is in the military, he’d be dying if he were stuck at home all the time. Or if he were here with Taemin now, listening the van creak in the wind, lying on a bunk that’s even harder than the ones they had in the room they all shared. Jinki and Minho could probably sleep just fine on the ground outside with all the bugs after camping out in the military, and Jonghyun would most likely end up out there too, since it’s too hot in here. Or maybe he would throw off his blanket in the night and peel off all his clothes, and Taemin would wake up to him still lying next to him, staring into his face. And Taemin would probably stare back. Or not. When he rolls onto his stomach, it doesn’t squash the things fluttering around in it.

Even now, his phone is still right there.

The last time he checked it was five minutes ago, when he was brushing his teeth. There was nothing then, and there’s nothing now. The days and weeks of messages at his fingertips look so different on the other side of Jonghyun’s silence, selcas Taemin shouldn’t have sent, late night texts he wrote without thinking that had him lying awake hours later, wondering how they sounded, if he was being too much, and the replies Jonghyun would send the minute he got his phone at five the next day. Too bad that to look at any of it he’d have to get past that picture. The blank space where Jonghyun’s answer should be.

_You said you needed to update me, hyung. That you’d seen me a million times and you couldn’t forget. Do you wish you could now, is it that lame? You don’t like it? I’m not pretty to you anymore? Say something, hyung. Anything. Even that you hate it._

_It’s nine thirty. You have your phone right now._

Taemin’s heart stops on the first ring, but Jonghyun picks up on the third, only to say, “You remembered I exist.” Taemin could say the same thing to him, if he could talk at all. His ears are burning and his body is melting into the bunk and he can’t even breathe, it’s too hot in here, and. “Whatever it is, it’s nothing important, right? Like breaking your wrist, for example.”

What?

This whole time Jonghyun stayed silent, was he waiting for Taemin to tell him about that? What’s the point, when it was all over the news. Taemin’s feelings crash through him like lightning, blinding, dizzying, splitting him straight in half, the part that’s relieved Jonghyun didn’t say, _You sent me a nude, Taeminnie, even you should know that’s weird,_ and the part that would rather be telling him, _I wasn’t even naked, I didn’t take anything off all the way,_ than try to find a good way to say, “You already heard about it from Jinki hyung, right?”

That’s better than the TV, but Jonghyun just grunts. “Mm.”

“You’re mad it wasn’t from me?”

Split second hesitation. Then, again, “Mm.”

That’s all. After days of silence, Jonghyun has nothing else to say to him. Taemin turns onto his side, curling in on himself. The window is totally black, and Jonghyun’s breathing is so light in his ear he has to strain to hear it over the night sounds. Taemin takes a deep breath himself, until his lungs are fit to burst. Then another.

All that, just to say, “I didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Not with me, at least.”

“Jinki hyung was there.”

And he’s so easy to talk to, Jonghyun knows that better than anyone, but before Taemin can even start to say it, Jonghyun is cutting him off: “And I wasn’t.” He sighs, loud and long. Taemin doesn’t even have to close his eyes to picture him running his hand through his hair, knotting his fingers in it. “Are you in a lot of pain?”

“If I say I am, will you forgive me?”

It starts as a joke and comes out as the worst thing he could have said. Before he can even think to fix it, Jonghyun is snapping at him, “Don’t play with me like that.”

He’s really mad. He’s really mad, and that same weird too-bright feeling is ripping through Taemin.

“I like playing with you, though. No one else lets me get away with it,” comes out of his mouth. And then, somehow, “Talking to you is one of the only bright spots in my life right now, hyung. If I brought it up I would’ve ruined it.” He gives Jonghyun another half second to answer, sigh or yell or let it all out in one long groan, _Taemin-aaaaaah,_ even tell him he needs to talk, same as he always does. But instead…silence. The kind that makes him want to hide. He’s been trying that all week, and if he hangs up now, he’ll be alone with it all over again. “I guess I ruined it for you, though.”

“You could never,” Jonghyun tells him. Taemin’s heart stops, then picks up twice as fast. “I just, I wish you would tell me things. And that telling me could make it hurt less somehow.”

“It hurts a lot,” he lets himself say.

“Your wrist?”

“And my heart.” Taemin turns over onto his back. The ceiling stares down at him, but again, all he sees is Jonghyun. Combing his fingers through his hair again, biting back a smile until he knows for sure that Taemin is playing with him again. Which he isn’t. “Console me.”

A year ago Taemin would have rather died than say those words, and even now, even with Jonghyun there to catch him, it’s like stepping out into nothing.

_You don’t have to say anything special, hyung. Just something. Anything. Please._

“You were right, what you said about Jinki hyung. Over the phone is no good.” Huh? Taemin can barely catch up as Jonghyun goes on, “Are you still filming this weekend?”

After all that, he wants to talk about work? He’s not going to say anything.

Ignoring the pang in his heart, the part of him that’s dying to say, _Don’t bother getting mad if you don’t care in the end,_ Taemin tells him, “One of the locations fell through and they’re scrambling. It’s looking like we’ll pick up again next week.”

“Go home and stay there and wait for me.”

What?

Taemin’s heart leaps out of his chest, smashing through the ceiling. The stars spin over him as the rest of him lays here same as before, stiff and achy and tired. He can’t feel any of that. Anything at all. Is Jonghyun serious, does he really mean—?

“You’re allowed to visit again?”

“Just in time,” Jonghyun says. “You make hyung so crazy. It’s not even that you can’t take care of yourself, you just don’t.”

Somehow in all the years Jonghyun has known him, he still hasn’t realized how selfish Taemin is. All he ever thinks of is himself, and he’s never taken care of anyone else. Even now, with the world ending outside this stupid camper, he’s lying here wishing with all his heart that he didn’t have to ask, “Is it okay for you to come see me? I’ve been around a lot of people, hyung. We’re being as careful as we can, but you know how filming is.”

“Have you gotten tested recently?”

He’s not asking because he cares if Taemin gets him sick, he’s asking so that he’ll be able to sleep tonight when he gets off the phone, knowing Taemin is safe. Which he is. He’s young and he’s healthy and his immune system is way stronger than Jonghyun’s, and, “The PD wouldn’t go ahead unless we were all negative.” That too. Taemin’s heart is hurting as badly as his wrist all of the sudden, this ache so deep inside him. “What about you?”

“There hasn’t been a case at my base since March.”

“You never told me there were any,” is as far as Taemin gets before Jonghyun cuts him off.

“Don’t get mad at me, Taeminnie, that’s not the same thing at all. The possibility is always there for both of us, so there’s nothing to tell.” His pause pins Taemin to his bunk. “You actually got hurt.”

It sounds more like a reproach than an accusation. He never could stay mad. He’s impossible.

“Your body is like glass,” Taemin shouldn’t have to tell him.

“You’re the one who broke something.”

“Fractured. Barely.” This is so far from being the point, Taemin is being so stupid. They can see each other again, they’re going to see each other again, this is real somehow, and all he can do is start fights he can’t win. Even the one with himself, not to smile. “It’s almost ten, hyung. I don’t want to say good night like that.”

Seconds stretch into an eternity, until Jonghyun says, all hushed and gentle and Taemin doesn’t even know what, “I was saying I love you.”

He’s said it a million times before, and he means it more now than ever. He always does, every time. If he keeps it up, someday he’ll love Taemin so much he’ll explode from it.

Taemin would probably die first. That’s what it feels like when he says, “I know.” His heart is beating so fast. His chest is tight. His whole body is pins and needles, like it’s waking up for the first time. “So was I.”

Jonghyun takes that in, and of all things says back, “I thought you’d be happy. Do you really not want to see me?”

He wants to hear it again. Too bad. Taemin barely survived once, and he’s said it a million times before, too, even if Jonghyun has only heard it for half of them.

“Don’t try and back out now, you already said you would come.” _I love you, hyung._ “I should get back tomorrow sometime. Text me before you come over.” _You know I do, you know how much. You have to._ “If you think of something you want to eat, text me for that too. Me and Mooyeol hyung can stop on our way back to Seoul.”

“You sound so confident about answering your phone,” Jonghyun says, laughter in his voice. Which, _You have no right, hyung, you’re the one who—_

“—didn’t answer this time.”

Yeah.

Taemin said that out loud.

He brought it up. He brought it up he brought it up he brought it up, even after Jonghyun let it go, and now he never will, and. And Jonghyun is laughing, for real, breathless and ragged, catching in his throat. The kind that means it’s not funny. It’s really really not, or Taemin wouldn’t be on fire.

“How do you want to say good night? Sounded like you had something in mind,” he says, instead of answering now. That’s it. Really. Somehow. He has nothing to say about Taemin’s tattoo, or the photo, or any of it. Taemin breathes, breathes and breathes and breathes, waiting for his head to clear, for the things Jonghyun is saying to make sense again. “I had a girlfriend once who always wanted me to sing to her. It’s embarrassing just thinking about it.”

“I never thought you could find someone who was worse than you,” Taemin manages.

“What does your boyfriend say, then?”

They broke up in February. It’s July.

“I don’t know, just normal stuff.”

Taemin is lying again. Kind of. He’s not the one who called Dongwook his boyfriend, or the one who keeps bringing him up all the time. Maybe next time Dongwook texts Taemin that he misses him in the middle of the night, he’ll give him Jonghyun’s number.

Jonghyun makes a noise low in his throat. “Boring.”

“You’ve never even met him.”

“I don’t have to, I know your type.”

What is he even talking about? “I don’t have one.”

It only starts to feel like a lie when it’s met with silence, and the moment stretches between them weirdly, wrapping around Taemin and cutting off his air. The only thing his boyfriends all have in common is that Jonghyun hated them, whatever he says. None of the other hyungs ever give Taemin a problem, but whenever Taemin introduces a new guy to him, he always spends the whole time trying to prove who knows Taemin better and loves him more, at least until he gets too drunk from trying to keep up with them. The last time Taemin’s date left alone while Taemin took Jonghyun home, putting him to bed and patting his back all night instead of getting fucked into the mattress. _No one will even want me if you keep this up,_ he told Jonghyun over hangover soup that morning. _You’ll be stuck taking responsibility for me._

“Tall, safe, looks dependable but isn’t, then convinces himself you don’t deserve him when it’s the other way around,” Jonghyun lists off finally. He hesitates for another half a second, breath caught in Taemin’s ear. “You’ve never been romanced in your whole life, have you? And you always do all the seducing.”

“I didn’t seduce him, hyung, why would you even use that word?”

Why are they even talking about this?

Jonghyun makes another noise, low and amused, hot under his skin. “Did he make the first move?”

“He’s the one who asked me out,” Taemin is saying before he can even think. His body catches up before his head does, heat blooming in his stomach, scorching through him and leaving him choking for air. His face is on fire just like the rest of him.

“You know that’s not the kind of move I meant.”

Taemin _knows._ That doesn’t mean he has to say, “I sucked him off in his car after we had dinner. Is that what you wanted to know?”

Or that he has to lie there letting his own words sink under his skin, burning to ash. If Jonghyun even takes a breath to answer, he’ll blow Taemin away, into the night.

“Before you even kissed?” Jonghyun says.

Taemin is still here. Somehow. Which means he has to answer: Yes. “No.”

More lies. Jonghyun is going to know, he always knows. Fuck.

“Why does it sound like you think that’s dirty?” Jonghyun smiles in his ear, that slow, slow curve of his mouth that usually means he thinks Taemin is being cute. Tonight it slices straight through him. “If it were me, I would have liked it. Tasting myself on you. Knowing you were mine before our lips touched.”

Taemin dies. Is dying. He can’t breathe or think or talk or anything. _Anything._

“How can you just say this kind of stuff?” comes flying out of him, and then, “They’re going to think you’re having phone sex or something.”

Or something.

“He probably came too quickly,” Jonghyun goes on, in the same voice he would have used to tell Taemin good night, if he’d just said, _We’ll see each other in a couple days, hyung, just say it like normal._ “Did he say sorry for pulling your hair? When he didn’t pull hard enough.”

Taemin can’t even remember, he was drunk and it was over so fast, but in all the times since…yes. To everything. He always wound his fingers in Taemin’s hair and held on for dear life before Taemin even got his dick out, and Taemin barely had to tease him, kissing and licking up his length, before he’d start to yank, apologies and curses spilling out in the same breath. Then he’d shove his head down.

“But not for fucking your mouth,” Jonghyun says, like he’s in Taemin’s head. “Guys like that always lose control and then pretend they didn’t.”

“Like you wouldn’t?” shoots out of Taemin. As soon as he hears how that sounds he’s back to dying, telling Jonghyun desperately like every word doesn’t make it worse, “I’m the one in control, anyway. I know what I’m doing, hyung, I’m good at it.”

“You never stop until you are, if you like something enough.” Jonghyun’s pause grows inside Taemin, filling him to bursting. “You like it.”

Why are they having this conversation, why is Jonghyun doing this to him? Why is Taemin letting him.

 _My wrist hurts, hyung,_ is all he has to say. _I’m in pain. I don’t want to think about all the sex I’m not having right now. It’s been months since the last time I sucked Dongwook’s dick._ Or anyone’s. The sound of the zipper and the weight of it in his hand, so thick and big and heavy, knowing it’s all for him, he did that, he got them hard. Feeling their eyes burn into his skin as he leans in, caressing his hair, the nape of his neck, the line of his body, his lips, everything. That first taste. Before Taemin knew what he was doing, Kibum warned him that come was awful. It’s not that he’s wrong, it’s salty and thick and sticky and dirty, but that’s why Taemin wants it everywhere, coating every inch of his skin and filling his mouth and his ass, dribbling onto his chin and his thighs. Dongwook never even lasted long enough to come on Taemin’s face, and he lied and told him after the third or fourth time Taemin sucked him off that it was okay if Taemin wanted to spit instead of swallow, he didn’t mind. Maybe if Taemin had just taken him up on it, Dongwook would have dumped him in time for him to find someone else before Covid hit.

Maybe he and Jonghyun wouldn’t be having this conversation. Maybe he wouldn’t have called tonight. Maybe his dick wouldn’t be so hard it hurts.

“And then…what?” Jonghyun says. “He must have taken you back to his place. Did he get it up again to fuck you? Or at least touch you. One look at you naked should have been enough to keep him hard all night.”

_Hyung._

“He had work in the morning. He drove me home and kissed me good night and watched until I went in.” Taemin’s voice comes out so normal, even as he’s pressing his thighs together, twisting his hand up in the blanket, struggling so hard just to breathe. This is _Jonghyun._ “He’s not a bad person, hyung, we shouldn’t be talking about him like this.”

But it’s Jonghyun, and that’s the last thing that would ever work on him.

“I’m talking about you,” he says. “Did you go up and touch yourself?”

He was drunk and it was late, and he wasn’t even sure they were dating when he woke up twelve hours later to a voicemail from Dongwook, saying he had left his hat in his car and asking if he wanted to meet to get it back. It shouldn’t even hurt to admit it: “The feeling was gone by then.”

It does. So much. This is why Taemin never tells Jonghyun anything, so he doesn’t have to lie here with his whole body on fire and his heart cracking into tiny pieces as Jonghyun says gently, “Don’t date guys just to date, Taeminnie. Especially not ones like that. Let yourself fall in love.”

The way Jonghyun does? That’s worse, that hurts more. Jonghyun is the one who said those things to Taemin, stripped him naked and watched him get fucked, but he must be sitting there in his fatigues under bright electric lights, dick not even half-hard, heart beating like normal, for someone else. Whoever they are, Taemin hates them. So much.

“It’s ten o’clock,” he says. “I’m gonna hang up before you get in trouble.”

“Taeminnie—”

“You don’t have to tell me about your girlfriends in return, I don’t want to hear it.” The words scrape up Taemin’s throat, as sharp as they are bitter. “Let’s just forget we ever talked about this, okay?”

“Is it something you could?” Does he mean sex with Dongwook or telling Jonghyun about it? Jonghyun’s hesitation lasts an eternity, but Taemin has barely taken a breath before he says, “Sometimes I wonder what you’d think of me if we met later on. If you saw me as a man and not hyung, how I would look to you then. What kinds of things you’d let me say.”

 _If it were me you had dinner with that night, if you were in my car after, if._ It burns across Taemin’s brain, so bright it blinds him. When he can see again, it's a struggle to even breathe, whole body trembling with this strange new awareness, so raw and sensitive the air on his skin feels like a kiss. Hot and wet and open-mouthed, across all the secret places on his body.

 _You know you can say anything to me,_ he should be thinking. Saying. Telling Jonghyun what he already knows. _You just did. If you were anyone else I would have hung up at "seduction." No one uses that word, not even in porn. This is my life._

It’s his life and he’s in a camper in the middle of a water park when he should be in the practice room with Criminal, lying here desperate and aching, Jonghyun of all people pressed to his ear from fifty miles away. _Jonghyunnie hyung._

“Good night, hyung. Go to sleep.”

Another split-second silence. Then, “I wish I could hold you until you did, the way I used to.”

Sometimes Taemin woke up as hard he is now, living and dying as he squirmed away, when even the slightest movement could rouse Jonghyun. Not before they slept, though. Never.

“Say it back,” Taemin forces himself to say. “Like normal.”

Jonghyun makes this tiny noise, low and helpless and right in Taemin’s ear. “I don’t want to.”

It’s enough to send Taemin’s heart hammering in his chest. “Should I just hang up?”

As though he could. He lies here and waits, waits and waits and waits as all the time Jonghyun takes lays on top of him, toes curling, breath shortening. Then finally, suddenly, “Good night, Taeminnie.”

Taemin barely wraps his hand around his dick before he comes.

When Taemin wakes up to the alarm on his phone the next morning, it all feels like a dream. When he wakes up the second time to sunlight leaking in through the blinds and Mooyeol hyung pounding on his door, calling, “Yah, Taemin-ah. Taemin-ah. Taemin-ah~! If you don’t say anything hyung will have to come in—”

“I’m up! I’m up, I’m up, I’m up.”

Fuck.

The daylight burns straight through his eyes into his brain, lighting up all his thoughts. The same ones he went to sleep with. _jonghyun hyung jonghyun hyung jonghyun hyung._ His pajama pants are stiff with come and Jonghyun’s voice is echoing in his ears as loud as his name in his head, while his phone stares at him, silent and accusing. It wasn’t phone sex. It wasn’t, any more than the photo of his tattoo was sexting. This is what he gets for not having sex for half a year. Or for going without seeing Jonghyun in just as long.

He’s going to see Jonghyun this weekend. Tomorrow. Which could end up being today, if the shoot runs into the early morning hours. _Fuck._

When Taemin emerges with his toothbrush clenched between his teeth and his shirt on backwards, Mooyeol hyung hustles him over to hair and makeup, where the others are all gathered. Once the coordis have made him human again, the day picks up right where yesterday left off, minus the part where Taemin went back to his camper and came with Jonghyun’s words still inside him. But maybe that was just another game Taemin can’t play, only not because of his wrist, because he’s too dumb to understand.

_Are we going to pretend it didn’t happen, hyung? The same way you never answered before?_

But maybe to Jonghyun, nothing did. The same way nothing is happening now, in this strange upside-down world Jonghyun hung up and left him in. He probably didn’t even get hard, let alone jerk off in his bunk, and he’s probably never touched his dick with a single thought of Taemin in his head, even a stray one flitting across it like _Taeminnie is so cute when I embarrass him~._ Or _Why do I always hate Taeminnie’s boyfriends?_ And _Why would I ever want to hear about one of them having sex with him? Why do I always say weird stuff and confuse Taeminnie? Why did I still not want to hang up after all that, what more could I have said? Why did I say any of it? Why do I make no sense? Why do I always—_

“Don’t zone out on me, Taeminnie,” Baekhyun says. “Not when I’m trying so hard to make fun of you and give you screen time.”

Taemin can’t figure out how to zone in. The sunlight dazzles him. His body feels even less like his own than yesterday. Or maybe more, maybe that’s the problem. His wrist hurts just as much, but the glow under his skin is brighter than the sun beating down, and the knots in his stomach are all gone. And now that he barely has to fight to find his voice, he doesn’t want to use it to say the things PD-nim keeps telling him. _Don’t make it so obvious it’s scripted, Taemin-ah. Pretend you don’t know what’s going to happen. Lead the viewers into it naturally._ And then in the next take, _I said pretend, Taemin-ah~. Not that you should forget all your lines._ And in the one after that, _I give up. You don’t have to talk, just give me some good reactions. You know how lucky you are that you’re cute?_

“Are your painkillers bothering you, Taeminnie?” Jongin pulls him aside to ask finally. “You barely ate last night, too.”

“I forgot to take them.”

“Taemin-aaaah~”

Jongin makes this face like he wants to smush Taemin into a stick figure, but in the next second he’s calling Mooyeol hyung over, telling Taemin to tell him where to find them. Which Taemin does, since he doesn’t know how to tell them, _It doesn’t count as phone sex if he keeps asking about someone else, and you come after he hang ups. Right?_

Right.

When Mooyeol returns, Taemin downs two pills with bottled water and floats. At least until it’s two thirty a.m. and the cameras are still rolling and they’ve redone the same scene twenty times, and at least ten of those were Taemin’s fault, and Taemin thinks he’s crashing. Hard. The minute this is over he’s going straight back to his place and blacking out, and then maybe Jonghyun will text him that night? Tonight. That’s better than calling again, but after that Jonghyun is going to come over and if Taemin even tries to avoid his eyes, Jonghyun will just stare at him until he gives in and meets them, same as when they first grew close. Back then Taemin was too shy to look any of the hyungs in the program in the face and Jonghyun was the scariest of them all, and now that it’s shame, he’s even scarier. What if he takes one look at Taemin and knows, like with everything else? Knows what, Taemin didn’t even say his name as he came, and if Jonghyun hadn’t started it Taemin would never have had to finish it, and.

Why is every thought he has so useless? Even to himself, he’s such a shitty liar.

_Are you the same as me right now, hyung, are you thinking of me too? If I even take up half your head, you should think about giving it all up to me. Whoever that person is, you deserve more than .0000001 percent of theirs._

_I have shit to do and my life is falling apart around me again, and all I can think of is you._

The world is blushing pink when Taemin and Mooyeol hyung finally climb into the van and peel onto the empty street. He doesn’t touch the radio until Taemin flips it on, and then he takes over, flicking through until he hits a ballad. As the strings swell and a voice from another generation shivers in the air, Taemin slumps against his window and shuts his eyes. He doesn’t need Mooyeol hyung to tell him, “Sleep, Taemin-ah.”

He already is. Halfway. Or not at all. His phone is ringing.

Phone. Ringing.

Fuck.

“What is he calling for?”

“Jonghyunnie?”

Taemin’s eyes fly up to find Mooyeol hyung turning back to the road. “How did you know?”

Taemin never even told him he was coming up to visit, there was no time today. Yesterday. Whatever.

“Your face," Mooyeol hyung says.

What does that even mean? He’s not even smiling, not even a little. How could he be, with this hole opening up inside of him. Jonghyun must have already left base, or else he wouldn’t have his phone right now. Maybe he reached his mom’s house while she and his noona were still asleep, and he stepped out onto the balcony to call so that he wouldn’t wake them up. He probably couldn’t sleep all last night. Because he never can, not because of the things he said to Taemin the night before, or the things he’ll have to come up with when they see each other again tonight.

Taemin’s own voice is a transmission from another planet: “Don’t say anything weird, hyung, it might be important.”

Taemin accepts the call in the next heartbeat and presses his phone to his ear.

“You’re not going to ask me why I didn’t just text you?” Jonghyun says.

“I got off work, it’s fine.”

“Just now? You were filming all night, huh.” Jonghyun only hesitates for a second, before adding in a rush, “I just wanted to hear your voice,” and then, while Taemin’s heart is blowing up into a million tiny pieces, “I’ll hang up in a minute and let you sleep. Are you already on your way home?”

The sun has climbed halfway up the sky already, beaming down at Taemin. By the time he gets back to his apartment, it’ll be hot enough to burn.

“Mm.”

“How far away are you?” is the next question. What does that matter? Like he’s read Taemin’s mind, Jonghyun presses him, “Ask Mooyeol hyung, don’t just guess.”

Taemin has to hit Mooyeol hyung to get him to look at him, but all that gets him is one of his trademark smiles. Before Taemin can even open his mouth to ask, he’s already telling him, “Thirty minutes? Could be as much as an hour. Depends on the traffic when we hit the exit.”

Jonghyun’s voice is so soft, how could he possibly have heard him? And what if Jonghyun says other things. Dirty things, just like before. Taemin presses his phone closer to his ear as it glows hot, flattening himself against the window and turning away to stare out into the growing blue. It’s only half for Mooyeol hyung’s benefit that he says, “He says we could get stuck forever,” but he’s the only one who laughs, that deep, slow chuckle.

Jonghyun just says, “Then what’s your passcode?”

“What?”

Taemin sits bolt upright. What is he…?

Jonghyun gives him two seconds to answer, before teasing him, “Not even you need to ask Mooyeol hyung for that.”

“Did you already drop your stuff off at your mom’s?” Taemin says stupidly.

“I said I was coming to see you.” For a few hours. Dinner or something, and then maybe a movie and snacks, if there’s something Jonghyun hasn’t seen that his family wouldn’t want to. A hug goodbye at the door, before Taemin steps out of his arms and goes to bed and sleeps for a hundred years, without thinking up a single dirty what if. Jonghyun smiles in his ear, this huffed breath Taemin almost feels against his skin. “Quick, before the neighbor sees me standing out here and thinks you’re cheating on your boyfriend.”

 _Why would she?_ rockets up Taemin’s throat, but he swallows it back, along with, _She probably thought he was a friend, I never wanted him badly enough to risk kissing him where she could see._ Not helping. None of it is. Mooyeol hyung has totally forgotten his code of silence, shooting Taemin a glance, as if to say, _Dongwook-ssi is nothing to brag about, why would you lie to Jonghyunnie about breaking up with him._ Taemin tries really, really hard not to return it with one that says, _Jonghyunnie hyung is the problem, not him. We kind of had phone sex._ Anything even close to that, and Mooyeol hyung would probably drive off the road.

“I forgot you’d never been,” Taemin manages, but all he has to do is say it out loud, and just like that, his heart hurts. If he’s being crazy today it’s all Jonghyun’s fault, doing this to him on no sleep.

“Minho says it’s ugly,” Jonghyun says. “And that I’m crazy, I’ll end up sleeping on the floor. You would share your bed first, right, Taeminnie? We used to all the time.”

“I got a couch since he left.” Taemin’s face is burning so hot Mooyeol hyung is going to see. “A nice one.”

Jonghyun laughs like he’s not supposed to, that ragged, breathy laugh. “900408 doesn’t work~”

“Our debut date.” Taemin gives himself a moment to remember how to breathe, but he spends it all straining to hear the click and the slam of the door, a sharp intake of breath as Jonghyun feigns shock at whatever he finds, him snickering at his own joke, anything. “Did you make it in? Hyung?”

“How is it that I had to clean up after you constantly in our room, but this place is spotless?” Jonghyun says. “Proof finally that you did it all to torture me.”

That’s it? That’s all he has to say.

“I had too much stuff for one room, and too little for a whole apartment.”

“That shows you were meant to live with someone,” Jonghyun replies almost before Taemin can finish, this strange lilt to his voice that has Taemin’s stomach flipping over.

Back when they shared a room, there were twice as many mornings where Jonghyun stumbled in just as Taemin was getting up as there were nights they talked until Taemin drifted off, but when Taemin slept at home he always complained the dorm was lonely. Taemin told him he missed his parents, he wanted to see Adam and Eve, Jonghyun was annoying and their hours were different, all because he didn’t know how to tell him he would have stayed if Jonghyun were ever there himself.

“It is ugly, right?” Taemin says, instead of any of that. “I tried to decorate and everything, I even asked Kibum hyung’s help.”

“And what, he said you were beyond it?” Whatever. Jonghyun laughs in his ear, loud enough that Mooyeol hyung smiles. It only widens when Taemin shoots him another look he barely means, not with Jonghyun reassuring him gently, “It’s nice, Taeminnie. It’s a side of you I haven’t seen before.” His pause barely lasts a second, but it’s enough to send Taemin’s stomach swooping. “Hyung will have a look around while you’re gone~”

Taemin doesn’t let himself miss a beat. “You say that like you think it’ll scare me.”

“It doesn’t?” Jonghyun’s laughter catches in his throat, and again, he hesitates. Only barely. “Guess if I’ve seen one of your dildos, I’ve seen them all.”

Taemin’s face goes red hot and Mooyeol hyung’s eyes are suddenly fixed on the road. Whatever. It’s not like he’s ashamed, not anymore. That time he came home to a newly clean room and the dildo laid on top of his bed, big and black and silicon, with Jonghyun sitting next to it with his lips pressed into one long thin line, biting back a smirk or a frown or Taemin didn’t know what. _Where does this go, Taemin-ah?_

Before Taemin could think twice, he said in his ass. And then Jonghyun stammered and went red and told him in this strangled rush half an hour later, when he remembered how to talk, _I meant where in our room, you left it out. The things you do to hyung, really._ And late that night, as they both lay awake listening to each other breathe like strangers, _That thing fits inside you? You can take it, it doesn’t hurt._ Taemin pretended he was asleep.

_You like it._

All Taemin is going to say is, “Guess so.”

“I thought you would say hyung~. That way you do.” Jonghyun sounds like he’s…smirking? Or pouting? Opposites always come full circle to being the same thing with him. “That word sounds so different coming from you.”

Heat curls in Taemin’s stomach, but saying it is like breathing. “Hyung.”

“Mm.”

“Hyung.”

“You should hang up. Your half is way more boring than mine, Mooyeol hyung must be dying,” Jonghyun says. Would he have kept back half the things he said if he knew Mooyeol hyung keeps picking up on them? Or would he have said half the things he kept back instead, just to embarrass Taemin even more.

When Taemin sneaks a glance at him, Mooyeol hyung smiles. He must think they’re safely out of dildo territory, but that just means he doesn’t know Jonghyun like Taemin does. At any moment, any breath he takes, Jonghyun could force it out of his body with a word.

For now, Taemin lies, “He’s not even listening. He never does.”

Mooyeol hyung laughs.

“Still.”

Still…

“It’s not like you to run out of things to say,” Taemin says, nowhere close to goodbye.

“Usually hyung can’t shut up, you mean.” He pauses again, and again, Taemin has barely breathed in when he says in that one voice that means he’s picking his words carefully, “Your fridge is empty. Dieting again?”

“Quitting again,” Taemin corrects him immediately. He can almost feel Jonghyun’s smile warming his skin, making him so dizzy, but that’s just the sun. His own voice is leaving him so far behind. “My wrist will take weeks, they said. If you want something to eat I have a million takeout menus, there’s one for the jokbal place we always go to. Isn’t it amazing they deliver that far?”

“Because it’s you, Taeminnie,” Jonghyun says. That way he does. No one else says Taemin’s name like him, either. “How are they supposed to say no?”

_You think the whole world is in love—that the whole world loves me like you do._

“I guess I brought them a lot of business,” Taemin manages.

“And I brought you lots of groceries,” Jonghyun says. “I was going to surprise you.”

“With what?”

“You’re telling me I still can~. Hang up and sleep.” Then, all in a rush, “You were going to without saying goodbye, right? Taemin-ah~”

Taemin is so tired of that. He’s said nothing else since February. Even if it’s only for a weekend, he’s going to see Jonghyun again. They’ll talk, and eat, and talk some more, and Taemin will store every single thing he says and expression he makes deep inside himself, tiny parts of Jonghyun that will stay with him when he goes back to being alone. But he’s not going to think of that right now, in this moment.

“We’ll see each other in twenty minutes, what’s the point?”

Taemin hangs up. As Mooyeol hyung drives into the tunnel ahead, sun bursts inside him.


End file.
